"The sole palladium of the people's rights". Freedom of the pen as a counterpower in Kant and his contemporaries

For Kant's contemporaries, his claim that the “freedom of the pen” is “the only palladium of the people's rights” represented a clear political stance that favoured the thesis of the people's sovereignty and the inalienable individual right to judge the actions of the constituted power. This phrase echoed almost a century of political claims and bloody battles for freedom of expression and the press, from England to the overseas colonies and France.

A constellation of terms such as “bulwark”, “palladium”, “guardian”, “sentinel” or “safeguard” had in fact been used to attribute to the freedom of expression and the press the role of a sui generis right, capable of protecting all other rights and, thanks to the collective vigilance that it was able to ensure, of protecting against opposing abuses of power and unjust laws, qualifying itself as a countervailing power with respect to the political powers, closely linked to the right of resistance.

For Kant, too, the question of freedom of thought coincided with the philosophical question of the very nature of human knowledge and, at the same time, with the political claim to a power of the people, permanently opposed to that of the State and able to monitor it, judge it and, ultimately, overturn it.