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The Guardian
27-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
What Is Free Speech? by Fara Dabhoiwala review – a brilliant history of a weaponised mantra
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'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 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 Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala review
The top blurb on Fara Dabhoiwala's new book describes it as a 'remarkable global history of free speech'. But it isn't, and throwing in an interesting chapter on the press in British-occupied India, a tedious one on 18th-century Scandinavian free-speech laws and referring to the French Revolution doesn't really make it one. No, it's a polemical account of the evolution of American first-amendment exceptionalism (which the author, as we shall see, regards as an entirely bad thing), with most of the globe entirely omitted. You suspect the author all the way through of having what Keats called 'palpable designs' on you, but you don't fully catch up with his intentions until towards the end. I don't mean by this criticism that there aren't many interesting things to be discovered in the nearly 500 pages, but the arc of this history is bent towards its conclusion that what has gone before has led to abolishing 'any constraint on hateful or otherwise discriminatory speech. Nowadays American Nazis, antisemites, racists and other spreaders of group hatred shelter behind the first amendment. American media companies proudly follow the same principles, and export them around the globe, with predictable results.' The people who got us there, though often celebrated by less perspicacious historians, were mostly a bad lot. Dabhoiwala traces the popular origin of free-speech absolutism to John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, two English journalists of the early 18th century (Dabhoiwala's period), who wrote the principal, crude argument for freedom of the press – that freedom of expression improved society – in a series of pseudonymous letters for a London newspaper in the early 1720s. But these men were slavers and liars and were prepared to be seduced by powerful men to express entirely contrary opinions for money. Thus setting a standard for western journalism which Dabhoiwala – deploying words such as 'venal' and 'mercenary' – evidently believes has largely been followed ever since. Nevertheless they were influential and their ideas were picked up by the American revolutionaries and encoded in many state laws and in the first US constitution. Or, as Dabhoiwala characterises them, 'violent rebel settlers deeply distrustful of governmental power and obsessed with individual liberty for propertied white men'. The caveats on free expression developed by the French revolutionaries (their colour unstipulated) concerning public safety were not employed by these violent settlers – an omission that Dabhoiwala seems to consider lamentable despite the fact that, arguably, the French exception led to the guillotine. Meanwhile there was another twist to be added to the free speech argument. In 1859 John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, in which he maintained that the question was not so much whether free speech improved society, but that it was a right attached to the human being. This Dabhoiwala deprecates for its failure to allow that speech is an action like any other and like any other can cause harm: so logically a right, so it must be tempered by its effects on others. This is an observation with which the author regularly (and after a while, irritatingly) punctuates the book. Mill though, is flawed in another way. Being a supporter of British rule in India and possessing a contemporary attitude towards the empire's subjects, it follows that 'his argument was also rooted in a deeply colonialist presumption: that Europeans alone stood in the vanguard of history … [at a] fundamental level, therefore, Mill's argument about freedom of expression was saturated with imperialist presumptions about history, 'progress' and a sharply perceived division between 'civilised' Europeans and 'barbarian' others'. Note the quote marks here, because the author makes a lot of use of orphan quotes when he wants to distance himself from his subjects. It's a bad habit but probably not as bad as judging historical characters by the standards of today. In any case it simply isn't true that Mill's idea itself is marked by imperialist attitudes, as Dabhoiwala more or less admits when (in one of the book's most interesting sections) he talks about how Indians adopted the rhetoric of free speech to gain entry into national discussion. Bear this double-edged nature of free speech in mind – that sauce for the goose can be (no – will be) sauce for the gander and that what the author calls 'libertarian platitudes' have been ideas that have encouraged and assisted generations of dissidents and freethinkers. To him, however, 'Since it was first coined, 300 years ago 'free speech' [has] been a perennially weaponised slogan, wielded as often by the powerful against the weak as by the weak against the strong.' Really? I spent five years as chair of the freedom of expression advocacy organisation, Index on Censorship, set up originally to support dissidents in the Soviet Union. In those years we heard among many others from the Angola journalist pursued, imprisoned and almost killed because of his exposure of corruption, from the South African lesbian performer whose shows were disrupted and whose life was threatened, from the Belarusian human rights campaigner who is still in Lukashenko's prison. Dabhoiwala writes that 'even in the most oppressive circumstances [free speech] remains irrepressible and potentially subversive. It's not truly possible to stop people from communicating any more than we can stop them from thinking'. That word 'truly' is doing some work here. You can pretty much silence most of the people most of the time if you're prepared to put in the hard, totalitarian yards. Which is why 'free speech', if it is a platitude, is one of the most important that we possess. So what does Dabhoiwala consider to be the necessary boundaries of free speech? Don't ask, because, 'the real questions are never 'should people be allowed to say that?', let alone 'do you support free speech?' They are, rather – what should 'freedom' mean? What is free speech for? And, whose speech are we talking about, where and to whom?' This dictum should prevent me from asking whether, say, he thinks Salman Rushdie should have been able to publish The Satanic Verses, or whether this fitted the social harm category of 'demeaning a vulnerable immigrant minority' by ridiculing 'their holiest beliefs'? Rushdie does indeed make a cameo appearance, but only as a free speech absolutist who, Dabhoiwala implies, 'feels good' by standing against censorship. Rushdie's persecution at the hands of religious extremists is not even mentioned, doubly remarkable because while the book was being written he was attacked and almost killed 300 miles away from Princeton where Dabhoiwala teaches. I am not saying that the author does not make many good and valuable points and that he's entirely wrong to be alarmed at the use that extremists can make of free speech arguments. But even more worrying – as he might see had he written a history of the repression of free expression – is the use that authoritarians of all stripes can make of his own book. 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 Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Free speech has never been what you think – here's why
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.
