What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala (Allen Lane, 480 pages, £30)

Freedom of speech is never done with us, and we are never done with it. This is always true, but somehow it seems even more true at the moment. You need only log on to Elon Musk’s X to see how theories of free expression are tested every millisecond of every 21st-century day, often to breaking point. Here, on the surface, is one of the greatest engines of unconstrained speech ever devised; millions upon millions of people saying whatever they want, whenever they want. But what about the algorithms that push Musk’s own pronouncements to the top of everyone’s feeds? What about the bots that disseminate sex, lies and vituperation? What about the fact that the president of the United States himself is one of X’s most subversive users? To what extent is any of this free – or even speech?

It is a good time for a book called What is Free Speech? And that is what the Princeton academic Fara Dabhoiwala has delivered, although you also need the work’s subtitle, The History of a Dangerous Idea, to understand how it goes about its task. For this is a history book – running from roughly the printing presses of the 18th century to the social media platforms of today – that uses the past to polemicise about the present. As Dabhoiwala puts it, ‘the real history of free speech has the potential to illuminate our current predicaments in surprisingly direct ways’. He’s not wrong. This is certainly a book that challenged my own (what I’d have previously described as ‘purist’) preconceptions about free speech, although it could have done a lot more to challenge the preconceptions of a certain somebody else – Dabhoiwala himself.

The start of Dabhoiwala’s narrative is, effectively, England in the early 1700s. An age of wigs, coffee houses and – after decades, if not centuries, of religious and political loosening – a particularly active and rambunctious press. It is where one of the founding texts of free speech was published, the series of essays known as Cato’s Letters, by the journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. It is Cato’s Letters that contained the formulation, ‘Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together,’ which, in turn – thanks to the great popularity of these rebellious essays in a nation that was born of rebellion – helped to shape the First Amendment to the new US Constitution later in the century: ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.’

From there, Dabhoiwala contrasts the bluntness of the US First Amendment with the sophistication of its contemporaneous equivalent in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, drawn up in revolutionary France. ‘Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom’, asserts the Declaration, ‘but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.’ That ‘but’, on Dabhoiwala’s account, is all-important. On one side of the Atlantic, we have an ‘absolutist’ account of free speech that broaches no limitations; on the other, a ‘balanced’ one that ascribes responsibilities to free-speaking citizens. On one side, protection against government interference; on the other, protection all round. On one side, American exceptionalism; on the other, European egalitarianism.

This sets the stage for the rest of the book, which rails against ‘absolutist’ interpretations of free speech, which are often only absolute for the pampered and privileged. Dabhoiwala traces the spread of (more or less) Anglo-American and (more or less) sophisticated models around the world, often by colonial imposition, and judges them accordingly.

And that’s it? Not nearly. What is Free Speech? is a complicating text; Dabhoiwala revels in highlighting the hypocrisies, ironies and paradoxes of theories of free speech. Its best pages detail the non-unanimous and almost-accidental way in which the US First Amendment came into being, and then how it was jettisoned almost immediately by individual states. It was Pennsylvania, in 1789, that first drew on the French Declaration to draft its own law that included a reference to citizens ‘being responsible for the abuse of that liberty [of free communication]’. Many others followed, to the point that, as Dabhoiwala writes, ‘By the middle of the twentieth century, almost every state constitution defined free speech as a qualified right.’ Which is to say, there was push and pull before the First Amendment became what it is today, an almost religious precept. The course of free speech never did run smooth.

This complicating treatment is also applied to some of the heroes of the free speech movement, starting with Trenchard and Gordon, the authors of Cato’s Letters. ‘Their model of press and speech liberty was an essentially self-serving vision, masquerading as a neutral, universal one,’ says Dabhoiwala – and it’s hard to argue against him, not least because Gordon would eventually become one of the British government’s most powerful censors. Yet, even in such a target-rich environment, Dabhoiwala occasionally overshoots – a whole section is devoted to the connections between Gordon’s children and the slave trade.

Much the same could be said about the shoeing administered to John Stuart Mill, the liberal idol whose 1859 tract On Liberty is perhaps the font of most modern presumptions about free speech. Dabhoiwala is surely right to scorn the philosopher’s lazy distinction between ‘speech’ and ‘action’ so that he could more easily protect the former. (Mill’s construction is basically the hifalutin version of ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’ – and we know that words can indeed hurt.) But did he really need to spend quite so much time, during an otherwise revelatory account of the development of free speech in India, explicating Mill’s (for his time, commonplace) pro-imperial views when the philosopher already does that work in a few sentences of On Liberty (‘…we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society’.)?

Dabhoiwala’s greatest sins, however, are ones of omission. For instance, even though he claims to have written a ‘global history of free speech’, huge parts of the globe have managed to avoid his attention. China, he says in his introduction, is what inspired this book in the first place – after the country’s censors took their pruning scissors (or should that be pruding scissors?) to his previous The Origins of Sex. Yet it’s another 200 pages before the country is mentioned again, in passing, and an additional 50 before Dabhoiwala devotes a few pages to ‘the most elaborate censorship regime the world has ever seen’. Perhaps the sources weren’t sufficient to give China the same year-by-year, clause-by-clause beatdown that America receives – but, if that is the case, Dabhoiwala might at least have acknowledged it.

And what of ‘cancel culture’, which has, in Dabhoiwala’s own words, ‘become such a prominent feature of our present communicative world’? The phrase only appears in the book’s afterword, on p.335, and the practice itself is more excused than analysed. Again, there might be a good reason for this – even so, it’s hard to shake the sense that the historian has approached his task with a degree of parti pris.

Still, in that same afterword, Dabhoiwala responds to the question posed by his book’s title – What is Free Speech? – in a pleasing and persuasive way. ‘There will never be a single answer,’ he writes; there are too many contingencies for that. The speaker. The audience. The platform. The very purpose of the speech at hand. There is no one-size-fits-all approach when we are dealing with everything from the provocations of small-time comedians to the history-shaking lies of world leaders.

The only true response is vigilance and reflection. That’s what Dabhoiwala is doing with this book, whether you agree with its rule-favouring prescriptions or not. And it’s what we all ought to do every time we log on to X, or every time we hear something we don’t like or say something that someone else doesn’t like. Where do we draw our own lines of acceptability, and are we ready to defend and even reconsider them? That is the essence of free speech, and if you don’t like the sound of it – sue me.