ABSTRACT
Humans have expressed feelings of hatred (including detestation and ill-will) toward others for millennia. For example, in ad 83-84, the Caledonian chieftain, Calcagus, described the Romans as arrogant “robbers of the world” who “make a desolation” (by plundering, butchering, and stealing) and, then, call it “peace” (Schama 2000 , p. 34). But it was (according to the Oxford English Dictionary ) only in the 1980s that the noun “hate speech” entered political discourse. It did so in the context of the so-called “culture wars” that became a prominent feature of politico-legal life in the USA at that time (Hughes 1993 , pp. 18-26). We can also, however, place hate speech in a global context: the human rights revolution that began at the end of World War II and places emphasis on “recognition of the inherent dignity … of all members of the human family” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Preamble, 1948). Moreover, it is a topic that we can theorize by reference to the egalitarian philosophy of government that has informed developments in the fi eld of human rights in the last half-century. To this end, in this chapter, I draw on a prominent contributor to this philosophy of government, G. W. F. Hegel, who, among other things, identifi ed “the imperative of right” as: “ be a person and respect others as persons ” (Hegel 1991a , p. 60). Hegel’s thinking throws light on the three legal responses to hate speech that we will examine in this chapter. But before turning to hate speech, we must look at Hegel’s political philosophy in some detail. Likewise, we must examine the law in the three countries under scrutiny: the USA, Canada, and Germany.
