The long debate over federal regulation of commercial broadcasting has focused largely on constitutional, administrative, technological, and economic questions. But the fairness doctrine, right-of-reply laws, and equal opportunity provisions cry out for a treatment that is simultaneously more historical and more theoretical. They raise questions as fundamental as, What are the legitimate purposes and proper limits of state action? What is the basic rationale for press immunity from government control? For what purposes can this special freedom be curtailed? Even a superficial answer to such questions presupposes a historical understanding of the political traditions encoded into the U.S. Constitution, not to mention a theoretical analysis of the preconditions for effective democratic government.

PRIVATE POWER AND EQUAL ACCESS

According to the storybook account, the European theorists who most influenced the American Founding Fathers were tenaciously antistatist. If they viewed the state as an agent of coercion that must be restricted, they saw civil society as a sphere of freedom that must be enlarged. While they perceived the public sector as posing a threat to liberty, and therefore advocated its strict regulation, they considered the private sector to be utterly harmless, inviting only benign neglect. But how accurate is this portrait of those great European theorists esteemed and emulated by the framers of the American Constitution?

Rereading, say, Locke and Montesquieu, we find no trace of blanket hostility to the state; nor do we encounter any veneration of an unregulated private sphere.