Free speech has never been what you think – here's why

Telegraph

17-03-2025

Who decides what can and can't be said? The state, the church, the market, the media? The concept of 'free speech' has always been key to our fundamental practices: collective dialogue, political discussion, the transgressive possibilities of humour and art. Yet, as Fara Dabhoiwala, professor of history at Princeton, points out in What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, the ideal has also been 'perpetually manipulated by the powerful, the malicious and the self-interested – for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth'.
Free speech has certainly been a byword of late. In America, the new Trump administration is gung-ho on the matter, and the dominance of US social-media platforms has led many people to act, and talk, as if the First Amendment guaranteed total freedom of speech everywhere – when, even in America, it does not (obscenity, incitement, threats and defamation, among other things, are not 'free speech').
Yet, in a West polarised by the issue, the past decade has seen dramatic change. Speakers are banned from campuses, pensioners are imprisoned for remarks on social media, Christians are arrested for silent prayer, and there are even calls, in our House of Commons, for blasphemy laws. JD Vance, Trump's vice-president, has publicly stated that Britain is at fault: 'There have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British – of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them – but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.
The American tech oligarchs have taken the same line. Jeff Bezos has – to much wailing – determined that the paper he owns, The Washington Post, should focus on 'personal liberties and the free market'. Mark Zuckerberg has proposed loosening fact-checking and speech restrictions on Facebook. Elon Musk's ownership of X and the loosening of taboos around liberal and progressive ideas undoubtedly contributed to Trump's re-election. And while the new American leadership shores up its commitment to a robust, libertarian idea of free speech, there are widespread complaints in Britain that the courts punish words more harshly than actual deeds.
Yet none of this, Dabhoiwala argues, is particularly new. 'Fake news, lies, slander and the destabilising impact of revolutionary new media,' he writes, 'were equally prominent problems around 1700, when free speech was first theorised in its modern form.' To this end, he notes the significance of 'Cato's Letters', anonymous newspaper articles written by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, which put forward 'an essential secular ideal of free speech as a popular political right', preceded by the rise in religious liberty and set aflame by the explosion in weekly and daily publications: thus the freedom of the press was born.
Tracing a global history of speaking freely is no small task. Dabhoiwala tracks the vicissitudes of the idea with gusto, through religious prohibitions (heresy and blasphemy), monarchical edicts (sedition, abolished in Britain in 2009), colonial suppression of slave speech, and the perennial existence of what our betters now call 'misinformation', which takes giant leaps forwards (or backwards) in the era of printing, newspapers and the internet. Central to all this is what he calls 'the growing influence of a deluded and hugely misinformed public' over hundreds of years, and the slow turn away from the 'common good' in favour of individual rights. There's a lengthy discussion of JS Mill on this point: Dabhoiwala situates On Liberty (1859) in the context of Mill's 'deeply colonial presumption' that Europeans stood at the vanguard of history.
While Dabhoiwala admits that, whoever or whatever kind of powerful entity you are, 'it's not truly possible to stop people from communicating, any more than we can stop them thinking', he simultaneously argues that free speech often has little to do with the quest for truth anyway: 'To establish facts and advance the truth requires not just individual effort but lots of collective rules and argument.' The model he offers is good investigative journalism and scholarship. Nonetheless, we can point to several situations in recent years where the common sense of the plebs has bettered the top-down 'wisdom' of elite collectives: Iraq, Brexit, Covid-19, gender ideology. People know very well when they're being lied to, and how the agendas of the powerful are at odds with the majority.
Dabhoiwala, like many today, argues that speech is a form of action, and therefore can do harm: 'Our modern distinction between words and actions… is just a convenient myth.' (He takes Mill to task on this point.) He's concerned about minorities being targeted by hate speech; at the same time, he claims that cancel culture is a result 'of the growing power and voice of previously marginalised groups'. Maybe, but his claim that speech can be 'at least as damaging as physical blows' is untenable. Anyone can claim to be offended, and the feelings of privileged groups, in any system, will be prioritised over others. In our era, words are fetishised: it's much easier to pretend you're doing something meaningful by posting on social media than it is to actively improve things in the world. The desire for weak regimes to prosecute people for their words is too powerful: 'victims' of upsetting words can always be invoked to justify tyrannical behaviour on the part of the state.
The dominant question of our era might be 'do you support free speech?', but Dabhoiwala would rather we pose it differently: 'What should 'freedom' mean? What is free speech for? And, whose speech are we talking about, where and to whom?' He considers America's First Amendment to be anomalous, and not in a good way: 'No other country in the world bases its rules about freedom of expression on an anarchic document drawn up more than 200 years ago by violent rebel settlers deeply distrustful of governmental power and obsessed with individual liberty for propertied white men.'
In general, What is Free Speech? contains some interesting discussion of religion, legal systems and the battle between Left- and Right-wing ideas of free speech; but in lines such as this one, it isn't offering history so much as contemporary activism of a troubling kind. Trump may act, as Dabhoiwala suggests, like a 'demagogue' – for instance, in banning the Associated Press from the White House for refusing to use 'Gulf of America' just because he demands it – but there's no doubt that the walls of post-war liberal myths are crumbling. Conversely, a Kamala Harris presidency might well have eroded the First Amendment to the point of rendering it moot, as various Democrats in her train petitioned for 'hate speech' bans. Perhaps the US Constitution is 'anomalous': well, good. In Scotland, online posts judged to 'stir up hatred' are now punishable by seven years in jail. Britain could learn something from America. People will always say things that others don't like – but that will never be a reason to lock them up.