A History from Socrates to Social Media. Embark on a journey through the tumultuous history of Free Speech, where Jacob Mchangama masterfully unveils the critical role of unbridled expression in shaping democracies. This book stands as a beacon, illuminating the path of intellectual freedom amidst the shadows of censorship.

Dive deeper into the essence of liberty with our comprehensive review of ‘Free Speech’—a narrative that champions the unsung heroes of our fundamental rights.

Genres

History, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, Sociology, Cultural, Law, Political Science, Civil Rights, Human Rights

“Free Speech” by Jacob Mchangama explores the historical evolution and significance of free speech, from its ancient roots to its modern implications in social media. The book highlights the importance of free speech as a cornerstone of democracy and delves into the challenges it faces, including censorship and the suppression of dissenting voices. Mchangama provides a global perspective, tracing the legal, political, and cultural battles that have shaped the discourse around free speech throughout history.

Review

Mchangama’s “Free Speech” is a meticulously researched and compelling narrative that offers a panoramic view of the struggle for free speech across different eras and societies. The author’s expertise shines through in his balanced examination of both the triumphs and pitfalls of free speech.

The book is not only an academic treasure but also a call to action, reminding readers of the fragility of this essential human right and the constant vigilance required to protect it. With engaging prose and thought-provoking insights, “Free Speech” is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamics of democracy and the power of the spoken word.

Recommendation

Freedom of speech has nurtured democracy since ancient Athens, though rulers and some religions suppressed it for centuries. The Reformation and the printing press made free speech almost impossible to restrain, explains author and podcaster Jacob Mchangama.

With the 1700s French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the ratification of the US Constitution’s First Amendment, freedom of speech and the press became intrinsic to Western democracy. However, autocrats still suppress these freedoms, and technology challenges them. People and governments must treasure free speech and use it with care, knowing that in the wrong hands, it can be divisive and even antidemocratic.

Take-Aways

• The ancient Athenians promoted democracy and free speech.
• The printing press – and Martin Luther’s Reformation – blew open new possibilities for free speech.
• The Dutch Republic in the 16th century nurtured freedom of speech and of conscience.
• Enlightenment rationality advocated freedom of speech but didn’t provide political security for it or for a free press.
• The American Revolution helped create a “bulwark of liberty.”
• In the 20th century, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany assaulted freedom of speech and of the press.
• In the digital age, democracy needs freedom of speech, but the internet’s destructive possibilities threaten democracies everywhere.

Summary

The ancient Athenians promoted democracy and free speech.

The ancient world wasn’t a bastion of free speech. Hittite laws, for example, held that people who judged their king would have their houses destroyed. The Bible asserts that people who deride “God and King” should be stoned to death. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese weren’t much more liberal, and limits on speech for enslaved people and women were strict everywhere.

“Not until the fifth century does the fog of ancient history reveal a city-state in which the values of democracy and free speech were formalized and articulated as a source of pride and virtue.”

The legendary Greek orator Demosthenes regarded free speech as the foundation of freedom and democracy, and stridently defended it. A coup in 411 BC ended Athenian democracy and led to the violent suppression of free speech.

While Athenian democracy was direct and populist, Roman democracy was “hierarchical and elitist.” Roman thinkers regarded Athenian democracy as chaotic and prone to hijacking by the vulgar and ignorant. The philosopher and orator Cicero argued that only the political elite should enjoy free speech.

The printing press – and Martin Luther’s Reformation – blew open new possibilities for free speech.

By the 12th century, philosophical inquiry and scholarship thrived in Islamic regions and Christian Europe, leading to the creation of universities. Early Islam included radical freethinkers, such as the ninth- and 10th-century philosophers Ibn al-Rāwandī, Rhazes and Avicenna.

Free speech expanded in Europe when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450. Martin Luther made books “go viral” more than 50 years later.

“From Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz, the printing press spread nearly as quickly as the books it churned out. The number of printing workshops exploded from a mere four in 1562 to a whopping 1,700 in 1500.”

Between 1450 and 1500, European printers generated some 13 million books – more books than scribes had produced in 1,000 years. By 1600, printing presses had generated more than 200 million books. The cost of books went down as literacy in Europe rose. The Catholic Church embraced the technology at first, but soon set up censorship commissions, and popes called for regulating the printing of books. The radical possibilities of the printing press emerged when Martin Luther publicly challenged the church’s authority in 1517.

Luther published in the German vernacular rather than in Latin, enabling ordinary people to read his writings.By 1530, around two million copies of his works had been printed. The Holy Roman emperor declared it illegal to print, distribute or sell Luther’s works. In one of his most revolutionary acts, Luther translated the New Testament into German to promote literacy. Suddenly, peasants could read the New Testament themselves and formulate their own ideas – and they revolted. The availability of the New Testament inspired the emergence of new Christian sects, such as the Anabaptists. Luther was not a free speech advocate. He advocated only for the freedom of his own speech. Before his death in 1546, Luther wrote anti-Semitic tracts and advocated the confiscation and burning of Jewish books as well as the destruction of synagogues and Jewish schools.

The Dutch Republic in the 16th century nurtured freedom of speech and of conscience.

By the 16th century, the printing press and Protestantism had transformed Europe. An increasing number of Europeans aspired to pluralism, “freedom of conscience” and freedom of the press. After years of repression, with the Inquisition burning people at the stake, not to mention burning books, the Protestant regions of the Low Countries revolted against the Catholic Spanish Habsburg Empire. This resulted in the creation of the Dutch Republic in 1581. At the Union of Utrecht in 1579, the republic declared freedom of conscience with regard to religion as a basic principle. The Dutch Republic became a haven for exiled radical thinkers such as Pierre Bayle, John Locke and René Descartes. Still, the Dutch didn’t consistently observe religious tolerance or formally acknowledge freedom of the press.

“There were those who literally meant ‘no one’ when they said that no one should be persecuted for their religious ideas.”

Writer and scholar Dirck Coornhert advocated Dutch tolerance, freedom of conscience and open discussion.He believed persecution for religious beliefs was anti-Christian and fomented social instability. The radical Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza of Portugal sought to undermine the authority of scripture. He argued that people have a right to think and say what they want. Frenchman Bayle, who fled to the Dutch Republic in 1681, argued for freedom of the press, even for heretical books. He believed printing heresy allowed people to combat it.

Britain lagged behind the Dutch in freedom of religion, speech and press. Still, as early as 1612, Baptist Thomas Helwys argued for “universal freedom of conscience,” including Muslims, Jews and various heretics. Baptist John Murton insisted that no one had the right to punish blasphemers. Poet John Milton argued that censorship damaged learning and the pursuit of truth.When the violently repressive Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, the British monarchy returned. King Charles II promised he would promote religious freedom and free speech. Parliament rejected those tenets, leading to years of persecution of anyone who didn’t conform to official Anglicanism.

Enlightenment rationality advocated freedom of speech but didn’t provide political security for it or for a free press.

The European Enlightenment affirmed rationality, subverted dogma and established tradition. Societies were becoming more secular, but authorities still limited toleration. The Toleration Act in England and policies in the Dutch Republic exempted Catholics, Jews and some Protestant sects from toleration. Still, European printers produced hundreds of millions of books and pamphlets. When England banned prepublication censorship in 1695, it became the world’s greatest producer of books.

“The flood of print created an irresistible urge to share and discuss the news and novel ideas in the many new venues of Europe’s emerging public sphere. Coffee houses became the 18th-century version of social media, where pamphlets, newspapers and books were shared and discussed.”

Underground Dutch printers formed an equivalent of today’s Dark Web. Iconoclastic Dutch publisher Elie Luzac published an atheist tract, Man a Machine, by French writer Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Luzac argued he had the right to publish texts even he found disgusting. People should adjudicate philosophical and religious differences through debate, de La Mettrie argued, not through the law. Two British Radical Whigs wrote the 18th century’s most powerful argument for free speech, Cato’s Letters, using a pseudonym they took from the Roman senator Cato the Younger. They argued that freedom of speech and freedom itself are internally linked so that if one dies, they both die.

By the 18th century, France’s Old Regime still censored books containing ideas it found threatening, but censorship relaxed after Louis XIV’s death in 1715. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, who were among the most famous free speech and free press radicals, wrote an encyclopedia they intended to encompass all the world’s knowledge. The encyclopedia questioned the authority of the church and the monarchy, and it nearly ran afoul of censors.

“Free speech is still an experiment, and no one can guarantee the outcome of providing a free, equal and instant voice to billions of people.”

Voltaire negotiated the boundaries of free speech. Authorities banned his 1764 book, Philosophical Dictionary, because it contained an article on freedom of the press. Philosopher Marquis de Condorcet was the most radical pre-Revolutionary French advocate for free speech. He argued that censorship violates a fundamental human right.

The American Revolution helped create a “bulwark of liberty.”

Modern scholars see freedom of speech as fundamental to the American idea from the beginnings of nationhood. The US Constitution prohibits any official suppression of speech, including of people’s political or religious views, thus creating American “free speech exceptionalism.”

Printing didn’t arrive in America until 1638. The materials that Harvard College printed suffered swift censorship. British common law and colonial law prosecuted people for criticizing the government or engaging in sacrilegious speech. Colonial Americans codified religious tolerance to maintain peace between Protestants and Catholics, as exemplified in the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 and in Pennsylvania’s 1682 Act for Freedom of Conscience. Authorities sent Benjamin Franklin’s older brother to jail for publishing political satire in the early 18th century. Franklin reprinted it and wrote an article arguing that free speech and free government go hand in hand.

“The decisive battlegrounds of the [American] Revolution had not been Lexington or Yorktown, but newspapers and pamphlets. The battles had not been fought with guns and steel, but with pens and paper.”

Between 1750 and 1776, colonial Americans published more than 400 pamphlets discussing the deteriorating relationship between Britain and the American colonies. Print technology created the American public sphere. Thomas Paine’s fierce polemic Common Sense, which spoke out against monarchy and in favor of independence, sold thousands of copies, propelling the American colonies “from the Pen to the Sword.” Nearly a month before Congress approved Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights codified freedom of the press as state law. And in 1791, Congress ratified the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany assaulted freedom of speech and of the press.

Freedom of speech may be an important value, but it can be used to promote hatred, violence and confusion. Policies in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shaped postwar European views about democracy and freedom of speech, making it clear that people must be militant about preserving democracy.

“On the one hand, freedom of expression is a foundational value ensuring the pluralism and autonomy that is anathema to totalitarianism. On the other, many countries restrict free speech to safeguard against propaganda aimed at undermining democracy and the rights and dignity of minorities.”

When Vladimir Lenin arrived in Russia in 1917, the country’s post-revolution provisional government affirmed freedom of speech and of the press. However, Lenin wanted to close the bourgeois press. The Bolsheviks believed they represented the voice of the people, and thus the state should control the press. The Bolshevik government formally destroyed press freedom in Russia. By the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s government had thousands of censors and controlled all publications.

Following World War I, Germany’s Weimar Republic, suffering coup attempts from the right and the left, authentically vested in freedom of speech. It forbade censorship. But the republic’s constitution had a fatal loophole: It allowed the government to suspend all rights, including freedom of speech and of the press, if it perceived threats to the people’s safety.

One question is whether liberal democracies today can resist far left or far right voices without restricting rights and resorting to censorship. Another issue is the proliferation of restrictions against the press and free speech in autocratic countries, which sometimes puts journalists in danger.

In the digital age, democracy needs freedom of speech, but the internet’s destructive possibilities threaten democracies everywhere.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated US support of Britain’s war against Nazi Germany in his 1941 State of the Union speech. He spoke of creating a world governed by fundamental freedoms – including freedom of speech. Following the war, the United Nations issued the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“If, as many experts, media personalities and politicians believe, free speech is as likely to harm as to strengthen democracy in the digital age, then elite panic may be an entirely prudent reaction aimed at reducing the harm while safeguarding the benefits of this fundamental freedom.”

The early days of the internet were utopian. The World Wide Web was to be a place without gatekeepers or hierarchy, where people could freely exchange ideas. But by the 21st century’s second decade, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was disseminating toxic, hate-filled misinformation via social media to his vast following. By 2018, Facebook shut him down as big technology companies faced questions about limits on online free speech.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are full of hate speech, which sometimes leads to psychological damage, violence and crimes. But restricting free speech online wouldn’t solve this problem. Studies suggest that preserving freedom of expression leads to less violence and extremism. A 2017 study concluded that restricting online speech in Western Europe amplified extremism. When Facebook and Twitter ban extremists, those extremists move onto different platforms, including encrypted services such as Telegram.

Social media may do more good than harm. It took nearly a century for the printing press to have a major impact. The World Wide Web has been around less than 50 years, and Google, Facebook and Twitter are even younger. In historic terms, the digital age is only beginning.

About the Author

Jacob Mchangama is founder and executive director of the Danish think tank Justitia. He hosts the podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech.

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