Marketplace of Ideas

The “marketplace of ideas” appears in The Assault on Reason as the Enlightenment ideal Al Gore argues has decayed. In John Stuart Mill’s framing, it is the space in which “truths… could be discovered and refined through ‘the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions.’” Gore ties it to a print-based public sphere — “the books, pamphlets, and essays of the Enlightenment” — that he says has, “in the blinking eyes of a single generation, come to seem as remote as the horse and buggy.”

Gore’s worry is that the marketplace has been corrupted into a commodity: when access to the public forum is gatekept and money is charged “in return for access, then those with more money have a greater ability to participate.” The “meritocracy of ideas that has always been the beating heart of democratic theory begins to suffer damage,” and the “consent of the governed” itself becomes “a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.” The concept thus sits at the center of the book’s account of how Democracy depends on a “well-informed citizenry” and the rule of reason — and what happens to Free Speech when the forum is no longer fully open.

Context: “The marketplace of ideas” is a metaphor for free expression most associated with Mill’s On Liberty and with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, where competition among ideas is held to be the best test of truth.

Where this appears

• The Assault on Reason — Gore invokes Mill’s “marketplace of ideas” as the Enlightenment print-sphere ideal now degraded into a gatekept, monetized commodity.