Borking Bork
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, libertarian legal scholar and reason contributor Ilya Somin directs us to his essay, "The Borkean Case Against Robert Bork's Case for Censorship," which is now available for downloading at the Social Science Research Network. In short, Somin deploys Bork's own arguments against anti-trust legislation to undermine Bork's later position in favor of government censorship. While the whole thing is well worth your time, here's one particularly sobering description of Bork's illiberal approach to free speech and popular culture:
At the outset, it is important to appreciate the radical sweep of Judge Bork's vision in Slouching Towards Gomorroah. Although Bork is usually viewed, quite correctly, as a conservative, there are some radical implications to this book. Judge Bork not only criticizes modern liberals and libertarians, he also goes way back to the source, so to speak, and attacks the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, and John Stuart Mill. Judge Bork harshly criticizes the principles of the Declaration, arguing that they are "pernicious" if "taken…as a guide to action, government or private." He denounces John stuart Mill's liberty-protecting "harm principle" as "both impossible and empty."
There is, therefore, a great deal at stake in considering Judge Bork's argument in Sloaching Towards Gomorrah. If we accept it, we would have to reject a very large part of the American tradition of individual freedom and perhaps even the broader Western tradition of liberalism.
