Free Speech: A History review – Humankind has always struggled with censorship
Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama (John Murray Press, £19.45).
Jacob Mchangama’s new book, Free Speech, is touted (by the late great P.J. O’Rourke no less) as “the best history of free speech ever written”. It would be churlish to disagree, even if that praise sounds like one of those playground legalisms: “The best runner here wearing green socks and with a middle name Pete.” Even if it is the best history of free speech – which it probably is – it’s not entirely clear where that gets us.
What we do have is a long 400(ish) page history on the nature of censorship and the battle for free expression. In those terms, it’s a fascinating and ultimately rewarding alternative take on history. This is Oliver Twist through the eyes of Bill Sykes, or Robin Hood, from the point of view of the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Where traditional histories focus on the great ideas thrown up by the remarkable people of history, this book focuses on attempts to silence them. This is the story of tyrants, dictators, theocrats, and petty autocrats.
As a result, the story quickly becomes a lesson in frustration as the despots too often win out, even at times when freedom should be in the ascendency. Free speech, as Mchangama reminds us, is a constantly evolving battle.
Even John Milton was not quite the radical believer as celebrated. “His chief goal was the open discussion of “those neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences” that saw various Reformed Protestant sects at each other’s throats, not free and equal speech for all.” As for John Locke, author of his famous Letter Concerning Toleration, he “was reluctant to tolerate Catholics and outright hostile to atheists.”
The gnarly nature of the topic makes Mchangama’s thesis so readable, even if, at times, it becomes overwhelming. There is rarely a binary choice, and free speech has rarely been as absolute as currently (and naively) conceived. That said, many fascinating points are made along the way, such as that it was under the Tudors that English notions of censorship began to differ from those on the continent.
“Most English censorship laws dealt with forms of defamation or libel rather than heresy,” explains Mchangama. “And from the age of Elizabeth, this crucial difference between English and Continental censorship became pronounced.”
By the time we reach William Blackstone and his Commentaries of the Common Laws of England, which appeared in the late 1760s, we have the much more modern sense of free speech by which “[e]very freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.”
As we begin to see, consequences are an important part of the story, as highlighted by the example of Sweden. “For all the groundbreaking developments in the Dutch Republic, Britain, and France (not to mention America), it was ultimately Scandinavia that became the first region in the world to provide legal protection for free speech and abolish any and all forms of censorship.”
It happened under the reign of German physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, who was the personal physician “of the mentally ill King Christian VII.” With the king unable to rule, Struensee became the de-facto ruler and, with it, encouraged a form of hyper-Enlightenment including absolute free speech.
It was an experiment that would prove “short, intense, and its conclusion nasty and brutish”. Struensee was eventually led to the scaffold where his “right hand was chopped off, he was beheaded, his corpse was drawn and quartered, and the severed head and dismembered body parts were exhibited publicly”.
Cheerful stuff but such is the nature of history viewed through the lens of censorship. Familiar characters play almost familiar roles but are coloured by their attitudes towards free speech, from the censorious John Calvin to the free-thinking Galileo, from William Laud to John Milton, Edmund Burke to Thomas Paine, and through to the work of John Stuart Mill.
In a way, the book builds towards its coda, which is another welcome defence of speech, even if the conclusions are nothing we might not have anticipated. “Today,” warns Mchangama, “authoritarian states— with China’s digital juggernaut leading the charge — are reverse-engineering the technology that was supposed to make censorship impossible to silence dissent at home and sow division and distrust abroad.”
And that is precisely the difficulty. If free speech was (and is) meant to help spread democracy and freedom, why is it so often used as a weapon to undermine democracy and freedom?
Even as reasonable people called for the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, Russia Today, to be taken down, some people claimed it amounted to silencing free speech. Who was right?
In the marketplace of ideas, how do we combat the problem that conspiracy and false “truths” are often more convincing than facts and truths? The idea that free speech will ultimately win is looking less certain.
This, perhaps, is where Mchangama’s argument runs into contemporary events. He presents us with the reassurance that “[i]f the First Amendment helped Trump win office, it was instrumental in removing him from it again. On the other hand, the absence of free speech in Russia has been a key component in Putin’s long and obsessive stranglehold on Russian politics.”
And yet it’s surely the First Amendment that might help Trump take the White House in 2024, whilst it is entirely conceivable that Russia’s disinformation campaign has exploited our belief in free speech ahead of (and during) their invasion of Ukraine.
It means one ends where one probably began: not so much doubting free speech as wondering where we go next. As this book admirably shows, the greatest minds of human civilisation have struggled with the ideas of free speech.
It makes one wonder what chance we have of improving upon them.