A society does not go silent all at once. It goes silent in the small ways first-hesitation, self-editing, a sentence swallowed before it reaches the air. This book traces that quiet drift. Without accusation and without emotional language, Lucien Hart shows how a civilization loses the space that once allowed disagreement, judgment, and honest speech to breathe. The change does not begin with laws. It begins when something that once stood above public life-something that protected freedom by not belonging to anyone-slowly shifts downward and becomes a tool inside the system. When that happens, people do not need to be told to stay quiet. They simply do. The Limits of Free Expression is an examination of that shift: how language is rewritten, how institutions lose their center, how moral certainty replaces careful judgment, and how a society can mistake silence for virtue. This is not a book of outrage. It is a book of recognition-written for readers who have felt the atmosphere change and want to understand why.