Free speech used to pull out the organ stops. Eloquent defenders assured us that it spread truth, made us into responsible grown-ups and held power to account. Without free speech, they said, democracy died. We listened with civic pride and consoled ourselves that bad as free speech could get — and that was very bad — there was always better speech.
Not any more. Freedom of speech is now an all-purpose cudgel for belabouring opponents in arguments about other things. Abortion? Hamas? Vaccines? Social media controls? Don’t sweat the facts. Accuse your adversary of silencing speech. The tactic has left the campus for high politics. To the present US administration, free speech is less cudgel than atomic bomb, for partisan use against protesters, liberals, Europeans and other malcontents.
Speech rows of that kind must look a luxury in the four-fifths of the world where, according to free-speech monitor Article 19, people’s rights to think, teach and speak are routinely, often murderously, violated. Contrast that daily oppression with the muddled and angry disputes over free speech in Europe and America, and you may wish to cover your ears until the shouting is over.
Alternatively, you can read Fara Dabhoiwala’s What Is Free Speech?, a rich and wide-ranging history which reminds us that disagreement over what may be printed or said in public has long been ferocious. For freedom of speech is not speech without rules but speech without wrongful interference. The principle is jewel-like, yes. Interpreting and policing its rules have always depended on who has means of power — public office, great wealth, a media megaphone. As Dabhoiwala writes, “[W]ho can speak, who gets heard and who makes rules about what one can say, has always been more about power than about truth, fairness or rational debate.”
A British social historian who teaches at Princeton, Dabhoiwala focuses on the spoken or written word in public debate about matters of common concern — political speech, in other words. He opens with a glance back at long struggles for religious toleration, which blurred into free-expression battles as print spread in the 17th and 18th centuries, and ends in a mediasphere dominated by American tech giants. For Dabhoiwala, the story of free speech is less a heroic, upward progress than a cycle of wreckage and repair.
Free speech is not an absolute liberty. It must be balanced against other concerns: public order, national security, common piety, conventions of decency, children’s needs, private reputations, or the social dignity of vulnerable minorities. Freedom of expression, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote in 1769, lay in the absence of prior restraint, not in “freedom from censure for criminal matter” printed or said.
One reason free speech is trickier than it sounds is that many harmful acts commonly requiring words are against the law: harassment, discrimination, plagiarism, copyright violations, selling state secrets, bribery, price fixing, breach of contract, insider trading, defamation, hate speech, “fighting words” or threats of violence, to name a few. When charged, you can’t claim your right to speak freely has been broken. Or can you? Especially in the US, where free speech is constitutionally protected, the question is ever in dispute, all the way to the Supreme Court.
Dabhoiwala here corrects misconceptions. Though often treated as a foundational part of the American Geist, the “absolutist” or exceptionless approach to free speech was on his account largely a 20th-century invention. He gives sparkling quotes from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who scorned the thought that free speech meant falsehoods and calumnies might go unpunished. Nor in the US was free speech just a radical or progressive cause. The American right has used it against, for example, union picketing, regulatory over-reach and campaign-spending limits.
Though focused on the Anglosphere, Dabhoiwala writes tellingly of British rule in colonial India. Once censorship died in Britain, it rose again in British India. Here he criticises the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill for patronisation and inconsistency — defending empire as tutoring the unready in self-government and drafting his defence of free expression, On Liberty, while holding high office in the oppressive and exploitative East India Company. Neither point, however, undermines Mill’s free-speech message — that pursuing truth, challenging conventional wisdom and sticking by unpopular or eccentric opinions until shown false were all needed together to avoid social oppression and intellectual stultification.
This is not an easy history to follow. Stable definitions are few and the free-speech past is less mapped than spotlighted. Principled arguments for free speech by famous philosophers and by now little-heard-of 18th-century pamphleteers get summary and extended treatment respectively. A useful message shines through, nevertheless: our free-speech quarrels are ill-named.
What Is Free Speech? confirms how most arguments over speech are arguments at the same time about something else. When someone pleads free speech, Dabhoiwala writes, ask yourself, what else are they after, and are you after the same thing? Despite a sceptical tone and a few too many dismissive asides, he doesn’t deride free speech in principle or doubt its value. He reminds us, rather, that who defines it, who enjoys it and who regulates it is politics all the way down.
What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala Allen Lane £30, 480 pages
Edmund Fawcett is the author of ‘Liberalism: The Life of an Idea’ and ‘Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition’, both from Princeton University Press
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
