In his essay today, Free Assembly for a Free People, Jan-Werner Müller draws from his forthcoming book, “Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces.” He addresses the underappreciated value of the right to assembly, a topic only a few American scholars have written extensively about, including Tabatha Abu El-Haj.

Jan is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton:

In the age of the internet, people coming together in physical space still matters a great deal.  This is especially true in countries where democracy is under threat.  As has become increasingly clear during the past twenty years of the “global democratic recession,” existing institutions, not least courts, often fail to stop aspiring autocrats, while citizens on streets and squares might push back effectively – at least sometimes.  Yet virtually everywhere the right to assemble has become more restricted.  Even in non-autocratic contexts, states are ready to crack down on particular people (known climate protesters are put into preventive detention); on proclamations (certain expressions whose meaning is debatable are now considered indissolubly associated with Hamas, for instance, and hence are grounds for prohibition of assemblies in Germany), and on possessions (in the UK, all kinds of objects might now be considered fit for “locking on” and can therefore be grounds for arrest even when an individual has taken no action at all that would suggest a desire to “lock on”).  It is urgent to reverse this trend.