Librarianship and Political Philosophy: Seven Arguments for Neutrality and Intellectual Freedom

Readings in classic and contemporary political theory affirm that institutional neutrality and intellectual freedom are far from being "abstract" ideals, but are instead essential for democracy.

Photo: Matt Brown, Thomas Paine Statue [flickr] CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons License.

Introduction

Are any two concepts in librarianship more contested and misunderstood than library neutrality and intellectual freedom? It is common currency in the critical literature to see these principles described as “abstract” and disconnected from the “lived reality” of people’s lives. Ann Sparanese—in her chapter in the book Questioning Library Neutrality—summarizes the tension this way: “Should librarianship become involved in the great issues of the day, or remain a profession aloof in the abstract world that thinks of intellectual freedom in the most idealized, purist (sic) fashion?” (p. 75) When not being openly questioned or opposed, there is also clearly some basic confusion on these matters, as with Anita Brooks Kirkland’s 2021 article in Canadian School Libraries Journal in which she asserted that library neutrality needed to be “radical” and activist in its “anti-racism” rather than suppressing alternative viewpoints in the name of neutrality, arguing “if neutrality in librarianship really means not being intellectual freedom activists, then it has no place.” Such concerns would seem to mistake a commitment to not adopt positions as an institution with the assumption that the neutral library will not be representing in its collections or meeting rooms any positions whatsoever–quite contrary to how the principle was originally intended.

Partly as a result of these disagreements and confusions, our profession has a decidedly selective and inconsistent adherence to these principles, proudly broadcasting its commitments to intellectual freedom by championing books espousing progressive causes, while books expressing disfavored views are simultaneously proscribed and rarely purchased.

Of course, opinions vary in the literature as to what library neutrality even means. It is regrettable that the drafters of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights back in 1939 didn’t actually include the term neutrality and define it; instead, neutrality has flourished as a discourse, rather than something actually codified. Yet, this hasn’t stopped more recent leaders in the Association from seeking to repudiate the term, as was the case with ALA’s 2021 Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work, which in turn led to the creation of a Working Group dedicated to replacing neutrality-related language in the profession. Longtime readers of this Substack will recall that our very first post sought to defend neutrality against this project.

I think that perhaps librarianship struggles so much with these issues because our discourse focuses so much on our professional contexts while not really understanding the larger context of democracy itself. Yes, we speak in general terms about the role that libraries play in democracy—often referred to (sometimes cynically) as “library faith”—but to what extent are our deliberations actually grounded in classic and contemporary political philosophy? In the paragraphs below I attempt to supply the rudiments of this grounding. I am seeking to argue that, far from being “abstract” and “disconnected” principles, library neutrality and intellectual freedom are well-grounded in the literature of political philosophy and viewed by its leading thinkers as essential to self-governing societies.

As is the case with many of the pieces to which I have contributed on this Substack, neutrality is defined here in terms of four interrelated dimensions: not imposing one’s values (or those of any stakeholder group) on library users; providing all stakeholders equal access to collections and services; applying transparent policies fairly for those stakeholders; and allowing users the autonomy to use library resources to pursue their own goals. And I am using the definition of intellectual freedom as promoted by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations: the right “to have access to the full range of knowledge, imagination, ideas, and opinion, and to express their thoughts publicly.”

While a full discussion of the interrelationship between library neutrality and intellectual freedom is beyond the scope of this post (but see Berninghausen, 1993; Burgess, 2016; Gardner, 2022; Oltmann et al., 2022; Scott & Saunders 2020), the important principle to bear in mind here is that intellectual freedom is exercised by the individual library user, while neutrality is the stance adopted by the library as a government-funded institution to facilitate that freedom, to the extent desired by that individual. This relationship is therefore very much tied to that between the citizen and the state: after all, the only reason for libraries to declare their neutrality is to permit free inquiry and discourse through the exercise of patrons’ intellectual freedom, while intellectual freedom cannot be fully exercised in the absence of library neutrality.

Philosophical Justifications for Library Neutrality

As articulated above, I am considering library neutrality and intellectual freedom as distinct concepts, but which are nonetheless bound together and mutually-supporting. I propose that they are articulated and defended by political philosophers using at least seven major arguments: 

1. Natural rights (as a negative liberty);

2. Civil rights (as a positive liberty);

3. Ethical arguments;

4. Instrumental arguments;

5. Democratic arguments; 

6. As a means to resist power; and

7. As the basis for stable societies and means of conflict resolution.

Let’s take a look at each in turn. 

1. As a Natural Right:

Many thinkers in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment wrote frequently about the freedoms of thought, speech, reading, and the exchange of ideas as being natural (that is, deriving from our creation). For example, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote in his treatise on legitimate government Leviathan that “Liberty of conscience is every man's natural right, equally belonging to dissenters as to themselves; And that nobody ought to be compelled in matters of religion either by law or force.” (We should feel free from the perspective of the cosmopolitan 21st Century to extrapolate from “religion” to refer to any comprehensive doctrine). In a similar vein, in his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica—written to oppose the English Parliament’s order requiring government approval for the licensing and publishing of all books—John Milton (1608-1674), opposed censorship because it results in the “disexercising and blunting [of] our abilities…our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limb.” While there are indeed bad books as well as good, Milton argued that God endowed man with the ability to “exercise his own leading capacity” to learn from both. Thomas Paine (1737-1809), in his The Rights of Man (1791) made this right explicit:  

Natural rights are those which appertain to men in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.

Paine made clear that as a natural right, no intervention on the part of the state is required to fulfill it; it is innate. In his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment? Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) added that, “[f]or this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point.” Finally, we note that Edmund Burke (1729-1797), also defended the naturalness of public reason in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) when he stated, “[f]or man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated, and most predominates.”

Isaiah Berlin writing in the 1960s would refer to such rights as “negative liberties” – those which may be enjoyed as long as the state does not intervene. Yet, Paine argued, sometimes natural rights may not be perfectly achieved without some intervention of the state; at which point they become civil rights, or as Berlin would have it, positive liberties.

2. As A Civil Right:

In The Rights of Man, Paine goes on to distinguish between natural rights and civil rights:

[Man’s] natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights…Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society…From these premises two or three certain conclusions will follow:

First that every civil right grows out of a natural right; or in other words, is a natural right exchanged.

Secondly, that civil power properly considered as such is made-up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not his purpose, but when collected to a focus becomes competent to the purpose of everyone.

Thirdly, that the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the individual, and which the power to execute is as perfect as the right itself.

Paine’s distinction translates easily to the context of librarianship: humans may have the natural intellectual freedom to learn everything or read everything, but the ability to do so becomes “defective in the individual” in the absence of the state making public provisions through an institution like the library to facilitate that right. At the same time, the power of that institution—produced from the aggregate of the community’s natural rights—cannot “invade the natural rights” to intellectual freedom of the individual. This proscription against “invading the rights” of others leads to our third justification. 

3. As an Ethical Argument:

Kant, in his 1785 book Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals introduced his famous “Categorical Imperative”: 

• treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means.

• act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. 

In other words, respect the agency and autonomy of other individuals—don’t use them for your own purposes; and act only in such a way that you would wish everyone else to act, i.e., don’t steal unless you feel it would be fine if everyone else in the world was a thief. Again, I think these map out fairly easily to librarianship: don’t impose your politics on library users but allow them the autonomy to arrive at and hold their own beliefs; and if you don’t want your political opponents imposing their politics on library users, then you shouldn’t do it either.

This may all sound fine in principle, but what are the practical advantages of such a view?

4. The Instrumental Argument:

In one of the greatest ever defenses of free speech, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), wrote in On Liberty (1859) that even false beliefs deserve a hearing because, while suppressing a true idea “deprive[s] humanity of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth” the suppression of a false idea causes humanity to lose "the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error." Minority opinions, he wrote, are “needed to supply the remainder of the truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.” If ideas are not challenged (if free debate is prevented), true claims tend to weaken; and if individuals are prevented from following their "intellect[s] to whatever conclusions [they] may lead,” then they “will be prevented from attaining the mental development of which they are capable.”

This is the very essence of intellectual freedom in libraries, and the self-defeating nature of censoring ideas to which we object: that doing so interferes with our own ability to reason. Yet, our own reasoning alone is not all that is at stake, but that of our fellow citizens as well. 

5. As a Democratic Argument:

This argument will be most familiar to librarians: that libraries strengthen democracies by facilitating the intellectual freedom of their users, thus making them more informed citizens. Yet, we still hear arguments that denying a controversial speaker a hearing in a public library meeting room doesn’t prevent that speaker from exercising their rights to free speech elsewhere. Alexander Meiklejohn, in his book Free Speech and its Relation to Self-Government (1948) argues that that’s not the point at all. The value of free speech (specifically as stipulated in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) is that it is a means for self-governance, so individuals can make informed choices as citizens, as part of what Meiklejohn referred to as the  “Electoral Branch” of government. As such, he placed primacy on the ideas that needing sharing, rather than on the unfettered right of people to talk, and on the importance of free speech to the hearer/reader, rather than the speaker/writer.

In the library context, we can plainly apply this argument to both the content of books and to public meeting rooms: that we are not so much granting free speech rights to authors and speakers, but to the right of readers and listeners to engage with the ideas being shared by such individuals. This was also the justification for free speech famously championed by Frederick Douglass in his December 1860 “Plea for Free Speech in Boston” following the cancellation of an abolitionist meeting the previous week by the city’s mayor—who, in Douglass’ words, “refused to protect” the event from the actions of a mob. He declared:

No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government…Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist…Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.

The provision by public institutions of venues for free speech may therefore be seen as…

6. As a Means of Resisting Power

Neutrality in politics or partisanship is not only about ideas, but rather is intertwined with power; for politics in its raw sense is the exercise of power, i.e., who gets to make and enforce rules and for what reasons. While ‘power’ is a topic for its own (much more in-depth) analysis, it is important here to acknowledge how different types of power affect political agents’ ability to work with or against existing forms of power. 

In his 1974 book Power: A Radical View, Steven Lukes articulated three dimensions of power: the first is the power to decide policy, while the second is the capacity to influence what the policy options are. The third dimension is that of ideology —the hegemonic ideas through which subordinated groups in society either accept as natural their subjugation, or else are resigned to it; in this way they can adopt a “false consciousness” that blinds them to their genuine interests. Lukes puts it this way:

‘False consciousness’ is an expression that carries a heavy weight of unwelcome historical baggage. But that weight can be removed if one understands it to refer, not to the arrogant assertion of a privileged access to truths presumed unavailable to others, but rather to a cognitive power of considerable significance and scope: namely, the power to mislead. It takes many forms, some of which we have considered from straightforward censorship and disinformation to the various institutionalized and personal ways there are of infantilizing judgment, and the promotion and sustenance of all kinds of failures of rationality and illusory thinking, among them the ‘naturalization’ of what could be otherwise and the misrecognition of the sources of desire and belief (149, emphasis added).

The neutral public library defending intellectual freedom is an essential institution for making available a diversity of perspectives and reputable sources of information and analysis, which the library user may evaluate and utilize so as to avoid being misled, or drawn into irrationality or illusory thinking. The important point here is that censorship and disinformation in the service of an ideology—both within and without the library—can be forces for subordination. Neutrality, then, is about granting the freedom and the ability to explore, play with and challenge ideas; while also recognizing when intervention is required on the part of the library to redress missing or subjugated knowledge. 

7. As the Basis for a Stable society and Means of Conflict Resolution:

Here we come to what is perhaps the most frequently-cited reason among activists to oppose neutrality and intellectual freedom—that they contribute to harm. Yet, thinkers over the centuries have argued precisely the opposite: free speech and intellectual freedom—and the institutional capacity to enable them—are essential to achieve social justice and to resolve social or political conflicts. 

In 1837, America’s sixth (and then former) president John Quincy Adams delivered an oration at Newburyport, Massachusetts in which he addressed the conflict over slavery in the United States, and argued, 

The free and unrestrained discussion of the rights and wrongs of slavery, far from endangering the union of these States, is the only condition upon which that union can be preserved and perpetuated. What! Are you to be told, with one breath that the transcendent glory of this day consists in the proclamation that all lawful government is founded on the unalienable rights of man, and with the next breath that you must not whisper this truth to the winds, lest they should taint the atmosphere with freedom, and kindle the flame of insurrection?... No! No! Freedom of speech is the only safety valve, which, under the high pressure of slavery, can preserve your political boiler from a fearful and fatal explosion.

Not only is Adams arguing that free speech will help America sort out the “rights and wrongs of slavery” (i.e., a pressing issue of social injustice) but is the only thing that can prevent political turmoil. 

Yet in order to negotiate across differences, the negative liberty of free speech is insufficient: society must also be possessed of neutral institutions with which to mediate between controversial positions, rather than allowing people to believe that they can decide things for others on their own authority. As Hobbes argues in Leviathan:

when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever: And when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamor and demand right Reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by no other mens reason but their own, it is…intolerable [to] the society of men…hey can decide things for others on their own authority.

That neutral force for mediation is referred to by Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Leary in their 1989 book Theories of the State as the so-called “guardian state” model of governance, which allows the State to act as a mediator between competing interests, rather than imposing an agenda of its own on society (see this HiTS post for further discussion of this reading). This is the essence of political liberalism, John Rawls describes in his 1993 book of the same name: that liberal, democratic societies should govern themselves according to “thin” procedural theories (freedom of conscience, thought, speech, and expression) rather than imposing “thick” comprehensive doctrines (metaphysical beliefs with corresponding social/moral conduct) which will inevitably lead to conflict. This approach has no “content” of its own beyond creating the political associations necessary for resolving conflict by working towards an “overlapping consensus” between “comprehensive doctrines.”

To summarize this final point: In the interests of conflict resolution and the pursuit and maintenance of a stable society, no one person can decide, based on their own reason or personally-held comprehensive doctrine, what the correct course of action for all of society must be (i.e., which side is on the “right side of history”) regarding controversial socio-political issues that affect society generally; but must instead engage with other citizens through mutual speech acts governed by a shared commitment to procedural theories of liberalism (e.g., intellectual freedom and free speech), and mediated by neutral “guardian” institutions like public and academic libraries such that no “comprehensive doctrine” is granted the last word, nor the power to compel belief in others.     

Conclusion

This is but the briefest of introductions to the correspondences between the rich tradition of classical (and contemporary) political thought and the tenets of librarianship. But even so, we can see that, far from being “abstract” professional principles, the conjoined practices of institutional neutrality and intellectual freedom are profoundly rooted in the foundations of liberal democracy as articulated by brilliant political thinkers over centuries. Note as well the cumulative nature of these seven arguments: they are not disconnected or random but rather build upon one another, indicating their complex and substantive nature. 

To recap: We all are born with 1.) the Nature Right to intellectual freedom as a “negative liberty”, but this may only be fulfilled as 2.) a Civil Right (or “positive liberty”) to access the neutral public library, whose employees are 3.) ethically committed to viewing library users as autonomous agents (or ends) unto themselves and in granting users the ability to 4.) discern truth from falsehood by being exposed as wide a range of viewpoints as possible, and thus be better able to 5.) contribute to public decision-making and democratic governance—which may, under certain circumstances, also entail using information to 6.) recognize one’s true interests and thus resist the unjust imposition of power, as well as 7.) aiding in resolving conflict through respect for procedural liberalism.

Given this understanding of the cumulative and integrated nature of these arguments, imagine how different our professional discourse would be if these ideas were common currency and required reading in LIS programs—that Week One of any “foundations” course offered students a grounding in political philosophy as a means of understanding the role of the publicly-funded library in democratic governance? Would there still be such widespread antipathy, skepticism or confusion regarding neutrality and intellectual freedom?    

I don’t believe so. Attempting to understand library neutrality and intellectual freedom without reference to political philosophy is akin to explaining speciation in the absence of Darwinian evolution: in neither case will the role of environment in facilitating adaptation and diversity be discernible. It is therefore difficult to escape the conclusion from this analysis that these political philosophies—in their collective and overlapping wisdom—act as critical and essential underpinnings for the joined principles of intellectual freedom and principled neutrality. Our profession cannot simply choose to ignore or reject these ethical and political imperatives for our own ideological reasons and still expect in the end to have retained its democratic commitments.

The author would like to thank Amy Girard, John Wright, Dr. Cameron Pierson, and Dr. Toni Samek for their suggestions and comments on this essay.

Bibliography

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