- The book is a global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today, covering various topics, events, and issues that shaped the idea and practice of free speech.
- The book argues that free speech is not only a fundamental right, but also a vital source of human progress and social justice, and defends it against the current threats and challenges from various forces.
- The book offers a balanced and nuanced perspective on the complex and controversial aspects of free speech, acknowledging the benefits and challenges, as well as the trade-offs and tensions between free speech and other values.
Free Speech (2022) traces the history of this world-defining idea. It provides a soapbox for some of free speech’s greatest proponents and highlights key events that pushed the idea forward from ancient times to the present. Offering an evenhanded treatment of the costs and benefits of free speech throughout history, it’s a powerful retort to all those forces that threaten to erode free speech today.
Table of Contents
Who is it for?
- Passionate defenders of free speech who could use more argumentative ammunition
- Students preparing for campus debates on whether free speech should be limited
- Anyone on the left or right seeking insight into modern-day debates on free speech
The history of a simple yet powerful idea: free speech.
Historically speaking, we live in a golden age of free speech. Documents such as the United States Bill of Rights and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights provide legal protection of free speech for much of the world. And, thanks to technological developments in media and the internet, speaking our mind and spreading our ideas is easier than ever before. We’re so used to speaking freely that we take it for granted, forgetting that for most of human history, this was not the norm.
We need to tread carefully because our right to free speech is far less secure than it may seem. Today, around the globe, censorship is actually on the rise. Outside of democracies, free speech is being eroded by a fatal mixture of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and high-tech censorship. And even within liberal Western democracies, faith in free speech is waning. The negative side effects of this freedom are more visible than ever before – from disinformation to hate speech. This may be the reason that free speech is increasingly being viewed as a force for division and even a threat to democracy itself. And now there are constant calls on both the left and the right to rein it in before it’s too late.
But the idea that democracy can be saved by censoring free speech rests on very shaky historical ground. History is full of examples of authorities that thought they could limit free speech while still enjoying a free and just society – and failed. Censorship never marks the beginning of a free society, only its end.
By connecting current controversies about free speech to similar ones in the past, this summary hopes to demonstrate just how much humanity has gained from this simple idea – and just how much we stand to lose if it were to disappear.
Ancient Beginnings
For most of human history, speaking truth to power was not advisable. Judging from the records of ancient law codes that have managed to survive, most ancient civilizations protected the ruling elite from the speech of their inferiors rather than the other way around.
From ancient Egypt to ancient China, surviving moral codes explicitly prohibit speaking out against those of a higher station. Such prohibitions on speech were designed to preserve the rigid social hierarchies that existed in ancient societies, where those on top were often seen to rule by divine right.
All the more remarkable then that one society was able to buck the trend: a small city-state in ancient Greece called Athens. By the fifth century BCE, Athens shined like a beacon of free speech through the tyrannical fog of history. Free speech was baked into the city’s mode of government at its core. It was a democratic system where the citizens themselves – that is, freeborn men – were expected to propose, debate, and vote on the laws that governed them.
While the Athenians’ concept of democracy suffered from several major shortcomings by modern standards with the exclusion of women and enslaved people, it was still exceptionally egalitarian for its time.
Athenians enjoyed extensive protections for free speech. In political debates, citizens were free to criticize the state and even democracy itself. And, in Athens’ famous theater culture, no one – not even the gods – was spared from satire, as Aristophanes proved when he made Dionysus out to be a fool in his famous play The Frogs.
The Athenian leniency toward speech was responsible for its cultural success. The free discussion of ideas in Athens’ public agora allowed for a vibrant intellectual spirit to blossom. This period saw great advancements in philosophy, science, and medicine that would likely have been impossible under a more oppressive system.
However, even Athens had its limits. The charge of impiety – that is, profaning the sacred religious rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries – was a serious crime, punishable by death. That’s something that Athens’ most audacious thinker would discover the hard way.
If you were to wander the marketplace in Athens in the late fifth century BCE, chances are you’d find yourself accosted by a man with a peculiar limp, bulging frog-like eyes, and an upturned nose. He’d likely be barefoot, wearing the same robes he wore every day and used as a blanket at night. This bedraggled figure is Socrates, and he’s widely considered the founder of Western philosophy.
Socrates was notoriously annoying. He spent most of every day dragging prominent Athenians into verbal sparring matches, where he would lead them down logical dead ends and reveal their ignorance. Eventually, even tolerant Athenians became tired of this act.
At the ripe old age of 70, Socrates was indicted for the crime of impiety; he’d allegedly profaned the gods and corrupted the youth of Athens with his ideas. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by drinking poisonous hemlock.
Historians have often debated why Athenians decided to execute Socrates so late in life, when he’d been speaking freely for decades. We may never know for sure, but it seems likely that a couple of coup attempts that had briefly overturned Athens’ democratic system in the preceding years had put its citizens on edge.
It’s possible that the fear of a resurgent antidemocratic movement rendered Athens’ citizens far less tolerant of dissent and spurred them to finally silence Socrates who could sometimes be critical of democracy.
If this is true, then the trial of Socrates reveals a valuable lesson about democracy that we moderns would do well to remember: in the name of protecting democratic values, the most important one of all – free speech – is often the first to be sacrificed.
The Inquisition
Unfortunately, the ideals of free speech and democracy that characterized ancient Athens would wither in the following centuries – and wouldn’t be rediscovered again for another two thousand years.
With the rise of Rome and its subsequent Christianization, the spirit of free thought that had blossomed in parts of the ancient world was replaced by rigid religious orthodoxy in the medieval period.
Astoundingly, as much as 90 percent of ancient literary works have been lost over the intervening years. Some of them were actively censored and burned by the church. But most perished due to neglect and lack of interest caused by the overly dogmatic climate. It’s not for nothing that this period is called the “Dark Ages.”
However, the medieval period was not a blank space in history as many imagine. Despite widespread intolerance of heterodox ideas, important intellectual developments took place that would pave the way for centuries to come. Most importantly, new centers of inquiry and learning in the form of universities began to spring up across the Islamic world and Europe. Nourished by the ideas of ancient thinkers, these newly established houses of reason became hubs for ideas that would eventually challenge prevailing religious orthodoxy.
The Catholic Church was surprisingly tolerant of these developments. While heresy laws existed as far back as the Roman Empire, the church’s main strategy to combat it was persuasion, not persecution. But this had changed by the late eleventh century; with universities bringing pagan ideas back into vogue, the church’s quest to eradicate heretical ideas turned militant.
Starting from the twelfth century, the main tool the church used to tackle heresy was the Inquisition: a vast network of independent tribunals tasked with rooting out and punishing false belief. With the Inquisition’s magistrates serving as prosecutors, judges, and jury all rolled into one, these tribunals didn’t exactly live up to modern legal standards. While the church insisted the Inquisition was undertaken out of “love” for erring brothers, those found guilty were burned at the stake.
The swift eradication of heresy required an efficient procedure. Inquisitors, therefore, found it more productive to focus on entire communities rather than just individuals. Once the inquisitors rolled into town, they would first announce a grace period where people in the community were encouraged to come forward and confess their sins, or denounce others, in exchange for leniency.
Of course, the real consequence of this policy was to spread fear, causing people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, or to denounce neighbors who they had a grudge against.
Another interesting side effect of keeping tabs on such a huge number of people was that the inquisitors had to invent new ways of storing and sorting through that information. Over time, the Medieval Inquisition produced an enormous network of archives along with indexes to sift through the records. The Inquisition was effectively the first pan-European surveillance network.
So, while the Inquisition didn’t invent persecution – that’s an age-old game – what it did do was systematize it through a bureaucratic structure. This “machinery of persecution” should sound familiar, as it’s been revamped and recycled many times over the centuries by both religious and political regimes alike seeking to enforce their worldview.
It’s interesting to note that in the Islamic world during the same period, nothing like the Inquisition ever took place. And it’s not because the Islamic world was particularly tolerant. Rather, there was simply no central religious authority comparable to the Catholic Church that was capable of enforcing orthodoxy.
The lesson to draw here, then, is that the real threat to freedom of speech and thought is not orthodoxy per se, but rather a single orthodoxy gaining too much power. When power accumulates in the hands of a single authority, this authority is able to control information and enforce its view of the truth.
The Great Disruption
In the mid-fifteenth century, something happened that would eventually dislodge the Catholic Church’s grip over Europe. It all started when an industrious goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press.
Few individuals have had so large an impact on world history as Gutenberg. From his workshop in Mainz, the printing press spread like wildfire. By the end of the century, there were 1,700 printing presses operating in cities across Europe from Lisbon to Kraków. In the span of only 50 years, these printers would produce more books than all the scribes of Europe had written in a millennium – and they were just warming up.
As book production skyrocketed, the price of books plummeted. A manuscript that had once cost the same as a vineyard could be picked up for the price of a loaf of bread. The upshot of this new affordability was that it rapidly increased access to the written word for huge swathes of the population. As a result, literacy rates began to shoot up, and economic growth and innovation soon followed.
But new technologies also bring new problems. Initially, Western rulers like the Habsburgs and Tudors embraced this new technology. The church even went so far as to christen it as a “divine” art. But they soon changed their tune when it became painfully apparent that printing had the potential to seriously disrupt the established order. It wouldn’t take long before the revolutionary power of the press would be showcased to its fullest when an opinionated monk called Martin Luther stepped onto the world stage.
In 1517 CE, Luther sent a letter to the archbishop of Mainz; it contained his now-famous list of 95 theses criticizing the Catholic Church. The Letter mainly criticized the practice of promising people a shorter stay in purgatory in exchange for a fee – a practice that Luther felt quite reasonably to be a scam. But he also went further, questioning the church’s legitimacy.
Luther was certainly not the first person to take aim at the church, but being born on the right side of the printing revolution, Luther had a leg up on the rest. The press picked up Luther’s ideas and, pretty soon, they spread like a sixteenth-century meme throughout Christendom. And so the reformation began.
Luther and the press were a match made in heaven (or, if you side with the church, in hell). It can actually be shown that the more printing presses a city had, the more likely they were to break from the Catholic Church and turn Protestant.
Both the church and state authorities attempted to push back, banning Luther’s works, but it was too little too late. Not even Luther himself could have stopped the reformation, which had a mind of its own.
But Luther could hardly have predicted the full consequences of what he had unleashed. By encouraging ordinary people to search out the truth for themselves, he inspired a slew of new religious sects. And the improved literacy rates among people who read the Bible also empowered them to read texts beyond scripture, laying the foundations for even more heterodox thinking.
In the end, even Luther himself tried to put the brakes on what he’d started. He stressed that good Christians ought to heed those sections of the Bible that emphasize respect for authority. He even, ironically, advocated for censorship of divergent Protestant sects.
Of course, in retrospect, it was naive of Luther to expect that after empowering citizens to read and democratizing the Bible, everyone would get in line. After all, if the pope doesn’t have the singular authority to determine the truth, why should a constipated German monk?
Luther was certainly not the only person in history to transition from champion of free speech when his own ideas were under threat, to persecutor of religious dissent once he had achieved power and influence. Luther’s situation speaks to the almost universal temptation to view free speech as a right for oneself but not for others. It’s a temptation that is perhaps embedded in human psychology, and it’s one we would do well to resist.
Seeds of Enlightenment
The aftermath of the Reformation was violent upheaval; once established authorities, both religious and political, were suddenly in turmoil. The chaos wrought by these warring factions did not exactly create a fertile environment for tolerance and free speech. Yet, despite this, by the seventeenth century CE, the first signs of a budding liberal society had taken root on a small patch of land in Northern Europe called the Dutch Republic.
The Dutch Republic came into existence in 1581 when the predominantly Protestant region of the Netherlands revolted against the Catholic Habsburg empire and declared independence. Over the following centuries, the republic would create a name for itself as a safe haven of free thought and freedom of the press, and establish itself as Europe’s printing house.
The reason tolerance took such a hold here had to do with the decentralized nature of the republic and the large diversity of religious sects living within its borders. After decades of book burnings and human immolation by the Catholic-led Inquisition, the Dutch were naturally suspicious of centralized authority, and each Dutch province was allowed to operate autonomously. As a result, any coordinated attempt to enforce censorship would have been impractical. What’s more, its location on the sea and contact with foreign places through trade contributed to a vibrant cosmopolitan culture where heterodox ideas flourished side by side.
Among those who sought refuge from persecution in the Dutch Republic were a great many freethinkers, scientists, and philosophers. These included René Descartes, who is recognized as the founder of the modern philosophical tradition, as well as John Locke, whose work helped influence the writing of the American Declaration of Independence.
Both Descartes and Locke were avowed Christians. Nevertheless, both of them, in their philosophies, did much to advance a purely mechanical picture of the world, which would later define the scientific worldview.
In the 1660s, the leader of a group of radical free thinkers by the name of Baruch Spinoza was ready to take this idea to the next level. Spinoza had already been excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for his “abominable” and “monstrous” heresies. Judging from his published work, it’s not hard to see why. In one work, he wrote a vehement rebuke of religious fanaticism; in others, he denied the immortality of the soul and claimed scripture to be the mere work of humans.
Aside from his obvious atheism, Spinoza also penned a high number of other ideas that should sound strikingly familiar to us moderns. He argued that free speech is actually a precondition rather than a threat to peace and social harmony. He distinguished between speech and action, and argued that only action should be regulated by the state. And he claimed that the purpose of the state should be to preserve the liberty of its subjects.
Spinoza’s ideas, and especially his unapologetic rejection of religious dogma, earned him notoriety as a provocateur and dangerous radical. His books became some of the most hated and prohibited works of his time, both in the Dutch Republic and across Europe.
But this couldn’t stop the spread of his materialist way of thinking. Despite strict censorship, an underground network of printing presses kept his books in circulation – kind of like the dark web of the seventeenth century. This black market for prohibited texts helped to nourish a growing number of European freethinkers.
The gradual rise of secular, materialist worldviews offered by Spinoza and others helped to usher in a more religiously tolerant society in the eighteenth century. By this time, the Age of Enlightenment was in full swing. And, in most European countries, the project of eradicating heresy fell out of favor. In the Enlightenment period, the question was no longer which orthodoxy was the right one, but whether to believe in any orthodoxy at all.
Historians of the Enlightenment have never been able to agree exactly on how to define it. But one thing they can agree on is this: all Enlightenment thinking was animated by a spirit of free and open discussion so that previously unquestioned dogma could be held up to the skeptical light of reason.
Weimar Republic
The legacy of the Enlightenment can still be felt today. We’ve inherited its spirit of curiosity and reason in the form of the scientific method. And we’ve institutionalized its sense of freedom and tolerance to foreign ideas in the constitutions of our liberal democracies.
But we need to stay vigilant. History shows that progress doesn’t always take a direct path. The freedoms we enjoy now are always at risk of entropy. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a liberal democracy has fallen back into tyranny.
A century ago, Germany witnessed exactly that. Wedged between an authoritarian monarchy on one side and a totalitarian dictatorship on the other, the Weimar period of German history was a short-lived, but nevertheless remarkable, interlude of freedom and democracy.
Admittedly, it was a democracy built on shaky foundations. Rising out of the ashes of defeat in the First World War, it was a period plagued by economic instability and political violence. Between 1918 and 1923, it experienced no fewer than five coup attempts and over 350 assassinations by right-wing extremists.
But, despite this, it was also a relative golden age of free thought and liberty – and it proved fertile ground for great advances in science and culture. The Weimar period produced nine Nobel Prize winners, including the Jewish Albert Einstein. It was also a period of major gains for women, who were granted the vote and equal rights.
But it wasn’t to last. Some people have argued that the Weimar Republic’s tolerance of free speech was partly responsible for its demise. According to the argument, if only the republic had done more to silence right-wing speech and propaganda, then its usurpation by the Nazis and all the horrors they inflicted could have been avoided. Many commentators today still appeal to this logic to justify censorship of radical ideas.
But, as we’ll see, this reasoning is misguided for a number of reasons. For one thing, the Weimar authorities actually did try to silence Hitler and his supporters. They banned him from making speeches, and they censored newspapers that carried his messages. But often, all they managed to achieve was to increase interest and sympathy for Hitler, who presented himself as the innocent victim of state repression. In the end, Hitler himself concluded that the prohibitions on him boosted his popularity overall.
Even though free speech was enshrined in the Weimar constitution, it was able to censor Hitler and other groups it deemed too radical thanks to a fatal loophole. Article 48 of the constitution stipulated that citizens’ fundamental rights could be suspended in the event of a serious threat to public order. This emergency law was intended to protect the democratic government. But what it actually did, once the Nazis came to power, was hand them legal recourse to silence all dissent and strangle the very system it was supposed to uphold.
The first voices to be shut down were the communists and liberal left, who were banned from publishing their newspapers and holding assemblies. Initially, the political right was on board with this development, but they soon regretted their support when the Nazis turned on them, too. One by one, every other political party was forced to dissolve. In just six months, Hitler transformed Germany from a vibrant democracy into a one-party dictatorship.
It would be too reductionist to say that Germany’s collapse into totalitarianism was caused solely by the Weimar Republic’s policy of censorship. It’s nevertheless informative to consider just how counterproductive it was to censor dangerous ideas – and how it actually paved the way for someone to come along and abolish free speech entirely.
The failure of the Weimar republic to prevent the rise of fascism through censorship should give pause to us today. Those voices that demand limits to free speech in order to suppress dangerous ideas and organized hate may be doing more to support them than they think.
Present Controversies
In the Weimar period, the only way you could really get your voice out there was by speaking on the radio or publishing a newspaper, which obviously wasn’t accessible to everyone. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, even the most marginalized members of society are empowered to speak.
Just as the printing press made information accessible to new groups of people, so too, has the internet connected people and ideas like never before. And, like the printing press, the internet has been just as disruptive.
Owing to its ability to bypass traditional forms of censorship, the internet has been able to penetrate oppressive regimes and provide information and power to people previously left in the dark. All over the world, citizens were suddenly unmuted, no longer merely passive recipients of propaganda. In short, the internet promised to bring about a new golden age of free speech; it professed to serve as a sort of cybernetic version of the Greek agora.
Nothing captured this optimism better than the Arab Spring. In 2010, when a Tunisian street vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against his government, the horrific image was caught on camera and soon went viral across the internet. This sparked mass protests, and within a month, Tunisia’s dictator fled the country. Shortly after, several other North African and Middle Eastern states were aflame with public protests, all fueled by social media, which spread ideas and served as a highly effective platform for organizing.
Yet the Arab Spring was not an unequivocal success, as it provoked cornered dictators to fight back. Of all the countries that participated in the Arab Spring, only Tunisia had a happy ending. The others either declined into civil war or suffered even more stifling repression. What’s more, the Arab Spring prompted other authoritarian regimes, such as China and Russia, to ramp up censorship of the web.
It might have been inevitable that regimes whose power was threatened by the internet would invest in ways of controlling it. But what’s more surprising is that even within liberal democracies, calls for censorship are growing.
Now that the internet’s honeymoon period is over, its dark side has become far more visible. Hate speech, online abuse, and conspiracy theories are just some of the ills that politicians and journalists have been sounding the alarm about. Some have gone as far as to declare an “epistemic crisis,” a crisis of truth.
Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are already deleting disinformation by using algorithms that automatically target sensitive words and images. Although these steps to eradicate harmful speech may be well-intentioned, they nevertheless represent a worrying trend.
For one thing, it gives states and tech companies the power to determine what’s true and what isn’t. What’s more, it’s not even clear that censorship is an effective remedy to the problem. One 2017 study showed that extremism is exacerbated by intense public repression, which provokes greater hostility and polarization. Censoring people online also prevents the possibility of offering reasoned counterpoints and discussion, which some studies suggest can be effective at tempering radical viewpoints.
It just goes to show that the solution to intolerant free speech may simply be even more free speech. We shouldn’t allow the dark side of free speech to obscure the many positives it can bring.
Still, even the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has admitted that the status quo is untenable. He’s currently working on a solution to democratize the web again and take it back from the tech companies that have commercialized it.
If history has anything to say, Berners-Lee is on the right track. A less centralized internet is likely to be one that’s much harder to censor and thus more friendly to free speech.
Jacob Mchangama is the founder and director of the Danish think tank Justitia and has won many awards for his work promoting free speech and human rights. He’s the host of the podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech, and he’s also published work on the subject of free speech for major publications including the Economist, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy.
Genres
Political Science, Censorship, Politics, Social Sciences, Government, History, Sociology, Philosophy, Cultural
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Ancient Beginnings
2 The Not-So-Dark Ages: Inquiry and Inquisition in Medieval Islam and Europe
3 The Great Disruption: Luther, Gutenberg, and the Viral Reformation
4 The Seeds of Enlightenment
5 Enlightenment Now
6 Constructing the Bulwark of Liberty
7 Revolution and Reaction
8 The Quiet Continent: The War on Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century Europe
9 White Man’s Burden: Slavery, Colonialism, and Racial (In)Justice
10 The Totalitarian Temptation
11 The Age of Human Rights: Triumph and Tragedy
12 The Free Speech Recession
13 The Internet and the Future of Free Speech
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Review
The book is a global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today. It explores how the idea of free speech emerged, evolved, and was challenged by various political, religious, and cultural forces throughout history. The book covers a wide range of topics, such as the trial of Socrates, the rise of Islam, the printing press, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the World Wars, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the internet, and the current threats to free speech from authoritarian regimes, terrorism, populism, and cancel culture.
The book also examines how free speech relates to other values, such as democracy, human rights, equality, dignity, and tolerance. The book argues that free speech is not only a fundamental right, but also a vital source of human progress and social justice.
The book is a well-researched and highly readable account of the history of free speech. The author draws on a rich variety of sources, including legal documents, philosophical texts, historical narratives, biographical sketches, and contemporary examples. The book is full of fascinating stories and anecdotes that illustrate the struggles and achievements of free speech advocates and activists from different times and places. The book also offers a balanced and nuanced perspective on the complex and controversial issues surrounding free speech.
The author acknowledges the benefits and challenges of free speech, as well as the trade-offs and tensions between free speech and other values. The author does not shy away from criticizing both the enemies and the champions of free speech when they violate or compromise its principles. The book is a compelling and timely defense of free speech in an era of increasing threats and challenges to this essential freedom.