ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the extent to which no-platforming and safe spaces enhance or inhibit the potential, whether libertarianism provides a viable alternative, and the implications for questions of social justice and civil liberty. Significantly, many of the individuals who have been no-platformed are individuals who had previously been heralded as 'progressively transgressive' writers and thinkers. The experiences which bell hooks highlights as shaping her vision of an education of transgression have resonances with both the classic liberal approach and late modern critical insights. Learning, then, is inherently related to the distribution of power in society, and to questions of social justice. Contemporary Western universities have their roots in the European Enlightenment Movement, which explicitly connected the academic pursuit of truth with the aspiration for social progress. The goal of free speech is to displace the irrational, and move society closer to truth and enlightenment.
