What Is Free Speech? by Fara Dabhoiwala review – a brilliant history of a weaponised mantra

The Guardian

27-03-2025

This book arrives at an interesting moment. Elon Musk has declared himself a 'free speech absolutist'. JD Vance worries that free speech in Europe is 'in retreat'. Donald Trump issues an executive order 'restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship'. Meanwhile, journalists are routinely abused, threatened with lawsuits and branded enemies of the people. US federal agencies circulate lists of red-flag words such as 'equality', 'gender' and 'disabled', and reporters are denied White House access for referring to the Gulf of Mexico by its actual name. Free speech is, shall we say, an elastic concept.
In fact, as Fara Dabhoiwala explains in this meticulous and much-needed history, it has long been a 'weaponized mantra' in a public sphere dominated by the moneyed and the powerful. Many of those who think of free speech as being uniquely under threat today are rich, white men – but then freedom, like wealth, is something that hardly anyone thinks they have enough of.
Our modern understanding of free speech as a more or less absolute right is a quirk of European, and especially American, history. Dabhoiwala traces it to two key texts. The first is Cato's Letters, a collection of anonymous newspaper columns published between 1720 and 1723 by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard. Their arguments were hastily assembled, full of fabrications and framed to defend their own mercenary interests. But they were taken up as a great, principled cause by the rebel colonies of North America and enshrined in the first amendment. The second text is John Stuart Mill's 1859 bestseller, On Liberty. Mill theorised free speech solely as an individual right. His argument rested on the shaky premise that thought and expression were essentially the same thing, and could not harm others – that speech was not, in fact, action. Mill's view now rules: speech is seen as harmless, which means that bad speech should simply be countered with more speech.
Most 19th-century thinkers on free speech, including Mill, supported the selective silencing of non-Europeans. In colonial India, free speech and press liberty were viewed as tools of enlightenment, benevolently bestowed by the British should the natives prove themselves worthy. While the Indian press was ostensibly free, a series of laws and practices maintained government control over all printed materials. Since Indians were seen as hot-headed, there were also specific laws against defamation and religious insult, later inherited by the new nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. From its beginnings, free speech was a complex and compromised ideal.
Free speech absolutism distinguishes the harmlessness of speech from the meaningfulness of action. It thus concurs with that childhood mantra, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me' – which, as any child could tell you, isn't remotely true. As Dabhoiwala reminds us, most societies through history have taken the power of words as read. They believed that spells, curses, oaths, vows, prayers and incantations had real effects in the world. 'Many times a scorn cuts deeper than a sword,' wrote John Donne. Some early legal codes allowed a man to kill another to avenge a severe insult. According to medieval Icelandic law, 'if a man calls another man womanish or says he has been buggered or fucked … [he] has the right to kill'. No reasonable person would want to return to that kind of policing of speech. But premodern peoples were at least aware of a truth that the Millian idea of free speech denies: speech is a social act. Words have consequences in the world; that is what they are for.
All speech is regulated, Dabhoiwala argues, officially or unofficially. We call this regulation 'censorship' when we dislike it, but it is an inescapable fact of the social nature of language. Academic scholarship, for instance, has a highly evolved system of quality control maintained by agreed methods and protocols, anonymous peer review and norms of scholarly and civil expression. This not only ensures intellectual rigour, but protects against ad hominem attacks and the domination of debate by vested interests.
Nowadays, free speech absolutism affects us all because of the unparalleled power of the US companies that control our access to the online world. Social media sites were heavily implicated in Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election; the dissemination of misinformation about Covid and its vaccines; and the spreading of violent propaganda against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Yet Facebook is now following X in rolling back its content moderation and factchecking operations in the name of ending 'censorship'.
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The lax attitude to hate speech by American social media companies shouldn't come as a surprise. Their main concern is with profit and market share, which favours both the proliferation of content and algorithms guiding us to the shoutiest and most polarising statements. But they can dress up this economic self-interest in American beliefs in the nobility of the first amendment – and may be sincere in doing so.
Dabhoiwala, it shouldn't be necessary to say but perhaps is, is not against freedom of speech. He is only asking us to question whether we should laud it as an end in itself, even as the highest ideal of all. He wants us to think of free speech as being not just about the content of words but about which voices are heard most loudly and which are marginalised. 'People hardly ever make use of freedom of thought,' Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his Journals. 'Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.' As free speech becomes more and more of a war zone, some free thinking about it might be in order. We could start by acknowledging that conflicts over it are inevitable, and can never be separated from larger questions about money and power.
What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.