The Limits of Community: Wendell Berry, Books Bans, and Intellectual Freedom as an Individual Right

Abstract

Beginning with a broad overview of community-oriented arguments for or against intellectual freedom (exemplified, in one case, by the writer and activist Wendell Berry), this chapter defines two forms of community: one active, the other passive. But do appeals to community make sense in environments increasingly hostile to intellectual freedom? In what ways have both of these forms already been weaponized by right-wing actors? It can certainly be argued that intellectual freedom benefits communities, but what if a community rejects intellectual freedom altogether? After detailing a recent case involving Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project as well as subsequent efforts to ban the project in school classrooms across the United States, this chapter comes back to Berry, using his writings on gay marriage as a framework from which to (re)cast intellectual freedom as an individual—not a communitarian—right.