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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A BRILLIANT HISTORY OF A WEAPONISED MANTRA  
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Joe Moran
March 27, 2025
The Guardian
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_ This fascinating book questions whether such a misunderstood ideal
should be lauded as an end in itself. _

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_What Is Free Speech?
The History of a Dangerous Idea_
Fara Dabhoiwala
Harvard University Press
ISBN 9780674987319

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.
 

Dabhoiwala wants us to think of free speech in terms of which voices
are heard most loudly and which are marginalised

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”.

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.
 
Joe Moran is professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool
John Moores University. He is the author of _Armchair Nation: An
Intimate History of Britain in Front of the Television_.

* Free Speech
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* Liberalism
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* Democratic Rights
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