The Leo Strauss Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy.
Citation from the Award Committee:
David Guerrero’s dissertation, “Reframing Expressive Freedom: Free Speech Libertarianism, Republicanism, and The Political Economy of Communication,” offers an incisively argued and carefully crafted analysis of multiple twentieth-century and contemporary debates about free speech. The award committee appreciated both the breadth and depth of the research and scholarship, which ranges from the legal, political, and philosophical writings of the early twentieth century to recent writings about the relationship between free expression and the public sphere. Guerrero’s arguments about the twentieth-century intellectual construction of a modern canon and ideology of free speech, a kind of “free speech libertarianism” that reads such a perspective into writings from John Milton to Oliver Wendell Holmes, sets the stage for an alternative approach. Guerrero argues that a more robust conception of expressive liberties would prioritize the diagnosis of various forms of domination of expression and communication, both private and public. The award committee was impressed by the setting of these issues in an institutional context that is alert to the contemporary political economy of speech. Along these lines, the dissertation offers a revision of neo-republican theories of speech that stresses both democratic decision-making at many levels and reformed regulation of contemporary media and advertising markets. This deeply insightful scholarship has the potential to shape ongoing discussions about freedom of expression in a manner that is richly informed by historical reflection, theoretical argumentation, and institutional analysis.
David Guerrero holds a joint PhD in Sociology (University of Barcelona) and Philosophy (University of Groningen), supervised by David Casassas and Lisa Herzog. His thesis was awarded the Sir Ernest Barker Prize in Political Theory (PSA, 2025), and a paper based on one of its chapters was runner-up for the Charles Schmitt Prize in Intellectual History (ISIH, 2024).
He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Germany. His research explores the history and theory of expressive liberties in modern Western societies (freedom of the press, religious toleration, freedom of thought, etc) with a focus on how the distribution of material and symbolic communication resources shapes the realization of such ideals.
David is working on a book manuscript based on his thesis, tentatively titled “Vestige of Laissez-Faire: The Free Speech Tradition and the Political Economy of Communication”. The book historicizes how ideals of expressive freedom have underpinned broader anti-regulatory agendas, even beyond the domain of speech itself. It highlights the often-inadvertent reproduction of a libertarian worldview in free speech scholarship and advocacy, with particular attention to developments in the US humanities and social sciences from the 1910s to the 1990s.
He is a member of the editorial board of the socialist and republican magazine Sin Permiso (sinpermiso.info), where he regularly translates and writes short pieces. He is also affiliated with the Barcelona-based research group GREECS (ub.edu/greecs), and is the founder and secretary of the Grup d’Història Social del Pensament Polític (Catalan Society of Philosophy).
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Sankar Muthu (Chair) of the University of Chicago, Dr. Barbara Allen of Carleton College, and Dr. Douglas Casson of St. Olaf College