At Law & Liberty, Adam Tomkins (U. of Glasgow, Public Law): In Pursuit of True Speech (reviewing What is Free Speech? by Fara Dabhoiwala (Princeton, History)). From the introduction:
Freedom of speech is in a bad place. The modern, young identitarian left appears to have given up on it, regarding it as a dinosaur, of value only to bigots, billionaires, and kleptocrats. Elements of the political right regard it as little more than a political football, to be kicked about in the culture wars as a weapon in the war on woke. The former are more interested in cancelling speakers who offend them than in engaging them in debate and seeking to defeat them in argument. The latter take an extremist approach to free speech (as long as it is speech they agree with), holding that anything goes in an unlicensed, unregulated marketplace of ideas.
Both are profoundly wrong and are doing immense damage to the once-cherished ideal of free speech. To help rescue free speech from the cesspit of the culture wars, there are two places we can look: to the past and to the world elsewhere. If free speech is in the deepest trouble in the United States, is it quite as bad elsewhere in the Anglosphere and is it in a better place beyond the English-speaking world? And if free speech is in trouble now, how did we get here? Was it always thus, or was a wrong turn taken at some point on the West’s journey from the eras of heresy and treason, sedition and blasphemy (all of which were crimes capable of being committed by words alone)? These are among the questions Fara Dabhoiwala asks in his new book, What is Free Speech? A historian now at Princeton who has formerly worked in Oxford and elsewhere, Dabhoiwala is well placed to address them.
What Dabhoiwala gets right is his framing: the way he sets up the problem is excellent, and the book’s introduction and opening two chapters are its strongest sections. He is right that free speech “has always been a weaponized mantra,” that understanding free speech “is also, always, about uncovering the unequal distribution of power,” that free speech has often been regarded as dangerous not only for its power to “unsettle orthodoxy” but also by reason of its being “perpetually manipulated by the powerful.” He is right that “wherever one looks, liberty of speech was never a stable concept.” He is right that, in the history of human development, it is a recent idea and that for most of recorded history it was simply “unthinkable”—not even “intelligible” as a concept. He is also right that, in the English-speaking world, Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1721–23) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) did more than any other works to articulate, celebrate, and popularize notions of free speech.
Or, at least, he is very nearly right about that. …
And from later on:
Much of Dabhoiwala’s account reads more as a history against free speech than as a history of free speech. …
The reason for this is that Dabhoiwala appears to crave not free speech as much as true speech. Throughout his accounts of Cato and Mill, he is captivated above all by their assertions about truth. He is right that what they have to say about truth can be unpersuasive. Free speech has not acted as a guarantor of truth, and Cato was wrong to suggest that it would. Mill, however, did not repeat that mistake. His argument was that free speech was needed in order to enable us to seek the truth, not that free speech would necessarily ensure that the true would drown out the false. (In this regard, Mill’s position was closer to Milton’s than it was to Cato’s.) Mill did not regard any argument from truth as his most important contention for free speech. At the core of his vision for liberty of thought and discussion lay his notion of individual human flourishing. We can grow and develop, and our judgement can be valued, Mill argued, only when we are exposed to that which we do not already know—to new facts, to divergent opinions, and to novel interpretations. That is not only a much stronger argument for free speech than any that relies on truth, but it is also an argument for genuinely free speech and not an argument only for true speech.
Posted at 6:01 AM