Overview

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. 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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Fara Dabhoiwala is senior research scholar and professor in the Department of History 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. Matthew Spencer was a newspaper journalist at The Australian for twenty years. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children. Black River is his first novel. For more information, visit www.matthewspencer.com.au or follow him on Instagram (@matthewspencerauthor).

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