Overview

“A brilliant history of a weaponized mantra.” —The Guardian A leading intellectual historian shows how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented as an unalloyed good, with enormous consequences for our society today. Every premodern society, from Sumeria to China to seventeenth–century Europe, knew that bad words could destroy lives, undermine social order, and create political unrest. Given the obvious dangers of outspokenness, regulating speech and print was universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way begin to break down. In a brief span of time, the freedom to use words as one pleased was reimagined as an ideal to be held and defended in common. Fara Dabhoiwala explores the surprising paths free speech has taken across the globe since its invention three hundred years ago. Though free speech has become a central democratic principle, its origins and evolution have less to do with the high-minded pursuit of liberty and truth than with the self-interest of the wealthy, the greedy, and the powerful. Free speech, as we know it, is a product of the pursuit of profit, of technological disruption, of racial and imperial hypocrisy, and of the contradictions involved in maintaining openness while suppressing falsehood. For centuries, its shape has everywhere been influenced by international, not just national, events; nowhere has it ever been equally available to women, the colonized, or those stigmatized as racially inferior. Rejecting platitudes about the First Amendment and its international equivalents, and leaving no ideological position undisturbed, What Is Free Speech? is the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood.

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Reviews

Fara Dabhoiwala's remarkable global history of free speech is written with wit, fluency, and dazzling erudition. Constantly surprising, and full of subtlety and nuance, it reveals what a new and innovative idea free speech was when it was first upheld as a civilized goal in the eighteenth century—and how many extraordinary twists and turns it has taken ever since, into the present. Examining who in history could speak and who was silenced, Dabhoiwala reminds us of the crucial relationship between speech and power. Eye-opening, thought-provoking, and deeply enjoyable, What Is Free Speech? is a work of great profundity and brilliance. -- William Dalrymple, author of <i>The Golden Road</i> This is a magisterial cultural and comparative history of the idea of free speech. Loaded with novel insights on almost every page, this book is meticulously documented with original and frequently surprising research on countless previously unexplored topics. -- Frederick Schauer, author of <i>Free Speech: A Philosophical Inquiry</i> and <i> Thinking like a Lawyer</i> What Is Free Speech? couldn’t be a more timely question, and Fara Dabhoiwala provides exactly the capacious history we need to address it. Dabhoiwala shows how an emphasis on free speech as an individual right has crowded out tougher considerations about the purpose, context, and audience for free speech. At once wide-ranging and trenchant, erudite and engagingly written, What Is Free Speech? represents the history of ideas at its smart, topical best. -- Maya Jasanoff, author of <i>The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World</i> Elegantly and resourcefully, What Is Free Speech? rescues an important principle from ideological abuse and journalistic simplification and enables a clear understanding of it. This essential book also grippingly relates the inseparably intertwined histories of liberalism and colonialism. -- Pankaj Mishra, author of <i>Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire</i> Fake news and distrusted information are not inventions of our internet era, but recurrences of disputed practices abounding in eighteenth-century America. With telling details and sweeping perspective, Fara Dabhoiwala offers histories of disputes over speech and its regulation. This bracing book shows the forging of contemporary conceptions of 'free speech' in the crucibles of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and technological disruption out of materials drawn from England, America, Scandinavia, India, and beyond. Anyone interested in understanding freedom of speech, its scope, and its limitations should read this arresting book."" -- Martha Minow, author of <i>Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Save Freedom of Speech</i>

Author Information

Fara Dabhoiwala is Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. Formerly on faculty at the University of Oxford, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, All Souls College, and Exeter College.

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