What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, Fara Dabhoiwala (Harvard University Press, 2025)
What is Free Speech? concerns the history of conceptions of and laws and practices concerning freedom of speech mainly in the Western world and its colonies since around 1700.
It makes very brief mentions of Ancient Athens, and of the intrinsic relationship there between free speech and democracy, but principally this considers modern Western freedom of speech.
It considers this concept anomalous in the history of human civilization, and that within this anomaly, the US First Amendment conception of it is anomalous, and within its history of interpretation, particularly that since 1925, since when it has trumped state law, and especially since the 1970s, since when, it is argued, it has become attached to and weaponised by right-wing libertarianism, big business, and social prejudice.
Therefore the subtitle ‘The History of a Dangerous Idea’ is not a tease that dares readers to join it in celebrating something edgy, radical and vital; rather it is flat and literal; it aims to point out the ways in which radical freedom of speech is dangerous, and causes people to get hurt.
It also traces the history of freedom of speech as an idea articulated with implicit or explicit exclusions of certain categories of human being. For examples women (in many places), the masses (thinking of the time when the freedom specifically of parliamentarians to speak truth to power was being advocated in the UK), slaves in the United States, or the colonised in British India. Dabhoiwala, with considerable iconoclastic relish, identifies prejudice, self-interest and bad faith on the part of many of the leading theorists of freedom of speech, including Trenchard and Gordon, the authors of the Cato Letters in the London Journal, who are quoted by Benjamin Franklin in what people assume to be his own best-known words on the subject: ‘Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech’. Dabhoiwala calls these writers ‘eighteenth-century hacks’ who were venally motivated; he observes their change of side to support of the King, and he traces their and their publisher’s connections to US slavery.
The book argues not only that this history of self-interest, bad faith, and exclusion is not yet over, but that its very existence renders the concept of freedom of speech, as an ideal, suspect. To the objection that any ideal could be damned by pointing out its history of imperfections and exclusions – notably democracy itself (and most humanitarian ideals have yet to be applied to animals without anyone suggesting that that fact discredits those ideals) – the book responds in a number of ways.
It says that J. S. Mill’s famously beautiful advocacy of freedom of speech in On Liberty not only explicitly excludes Indians as insufficiently civilised to benefit from it (he, like his father James, was involved in the East India Company), but that Mill therefore presents freedom of speech in an inherently racist way, as the pride and the proof of the most developed civilisations. Accordingly, advocates of free speech use derogations from freedom of speech as a stick with which to attack their enemies, as the radical Protestant John Milton condemned pre-publication censorship as Popish. Mill also wanted freedom of speech in order to keep British thought vigorous and worthy of ruling the waves, lest Britain otherwise sink into oriential regression. In slavery-era USA, freedom of speech granted the freedom to argue for slavery, and its attendant racist ideology.
Dabhoiwala argues that most freedom of speech theory draws an untenable distinction between speech and action. The age of duels, which events often originated out of purely verbal actions in honour societies, understood this point well. He points out that freedom of speech ideology concentrates on the state as the restricting factor, rather than any other factor, such as money. The book praises Marx and Lenin for having understood that a capitalist media amplifies the voices of those rich enough to own it, in a self-perpetuating cycle, and notes how Lenin broke from this by setting up a state media (whilst not approving of the ideological restrictions which were imposed through it). It implicitly draws an analogy between the fiction that is the neo-classical economists’ invisible hand of the market, and the invisible hand of freedom of speech in establishing truth and justice.
Even whilst it disparages exclusions from the right to freedom of speech, and even allowing for the distorting effects of money, it seems to have a relatively low opinion of the ability of the masses to reason, to tell truth from fiction, or to distinguish the public interest from what interests the public. As it says of early eighteenth-century British journalistic culture: ‘We see in these developments the origins of our own democratic culture. And yet what we tend to overlook is that the overwhelming currency of popular political discourse was not reasoned debate but hateful lies and conspiracy theories, inflammatory misinformation, crazy rumours’. Regarding today’s social media it says that free speech is not the antidote to, but amplifies, ‘misinformation and falsehood.’
In the US context specifically, it points out quirks in how the concept developed: that it started out as applying to, and restraining the power of, federal government only; private entities can restrict speech (although the book also criticises the tech giants for imperialistically exporting the norm of the First Amendment worldwide). It rightly points out the anomalously state-privileged position of the social media companies, defined as platforms in that they are not held responsible for what appears on them, but as publishers in that they have the right of selection and censorship.
Finally, the book argues that we should be clear on why as well as where we want freedom of speech: for the sake of the ascertaining or the keeping vigorous of truth, or for democracy, or for personal liberty, or for art, or for plurality of opinion for its own sake.
It is clear to me that the book has many important things to say, especially on excesses and absurdities in America, where freedom of speech is currently successfully appealed to in order to defend many things that on the face of it have nothing to do with it, such as the suppression of unions by employers.
Some of its tentatively proposed solutions to current excesses of freedom of speech are compatible with the recommendations of Lord Leveson’s investigation into media abuses in the UK: Dabhoiwala wants media regulation to be at a ‘safe distance from’ partisan government control, but beyond the ‘fig-leaf of self-regulation’. Leveson’s idea was that media outlets should be invited to submit to a Leveson-recommendation-compliant regulator, in which case any claim brought against them would be handled through low-cost arbitration for both parties. Any claim brought against an outlet which had not chosen to be regulated in this way would end with the outlet paying the claimant’s legal costs irrespective of the outcome of the case. This part of Leveson’s recommendations has not been implemented. Dabhoiwala believes that there is a place for arms-length state-owned media, such as the BBC in theory is, to offer an alternative to the plutocratic-owned private media.
However, my criticism is the overall balance of the book. It says that freedom of speech is ‘wielded as often by the strong against the weak as by the weak against the strong’. You could say the same of the law itself – but the law does, on balance, help the weak. Those who need freedom of speech most are the poor and oppressed, which is why, as the book gives many examples of, it is often the oppressed who have agitated for it. Dabhoiwala argues that in the context of most democracies, social media platforms have degraded the health of democracy itself. To this I would respond that it is the legacy media that has failed because it has become so aligned with the establishment. Especially in the UK, there has been a striking narrowing of the Overton window, and progressive voices have a platform on social media that they lack elsewhere.
Given the importance of the principle, I think that calling freedom of speech a ‘racialised ideology’, a ‘deeply gendered theory’ or an ‘artificial doctrine’ is unhelpful (these descriptors apply equally well to many other concepts, such as human rights).
At moments – at its worst – the book risks appearing to weaponize anti-sexism, anti-racism and anti-imperialism in the service of its argument in favour of censoring speech that is opposed to the author’s own political opinions, which he does not trouble to hide.
Most troubling of all is the book’s silence on many recent and severe derogations from freedom of speech in the Western world. I say this whilst recognizing that opposing unwarranted suppressions of freedom of speech does not in any way mean that one cannot or should not also oppose failures to properly restrict speech.
This omission is apparent in the book’s treatment of the significance of the ending of the Cold War, on which it says: ‘The internet came at the end of history, freedom above all, free markets, free expression. It was thought liberty would spread everywhere by the internet.’ In saying this, it overlooks the freedom given to the West by the decline of the Soviet Union to adopt Communist principles and practices – such as spying on its own population to a degree that would have left the KGB dazzled and even Orwell impressed, or controlling free speech through deplatforming and shadow banning – without the evident hypocrisy and therefore embarrassment that doing this during the Cold War, when the West defined itself precisely in its opposition to such practices, would have caused.
To take examples from the UK: in certain respects, Britons have less freedom of speech now (considering this principle as including the right to access information and views) in this country than during WWII (see this interview from 5 minutes 20 for another expression of this view). Then, Britons could access Nazi broadcasts. During the Cold War they could freely listen to Radio Moscow and read Soviet newspapers exported to the West. Today, web browsers are blocked from accessing RT. During the 1970s one could see posters in London student bars celebrating the Baader Meinhof Gang, a German Marxist terrorist organisation which was responsible for the murders of around thirty-four people. Today, under the 2000 Terrorism Act, one may be imprisoned as a terrorist for expressing support for a non-violent direct action group that opposes genocide.
The 2000 Terrorism Act reads as though expressly designed to curtail the need for due process. It criminalises nothing that was not criminal already; that is, the concept of ‘terrorism’ adds nothing to the roster of punishable crimes. When it was written (before the 9/11 attacks, therefore not even written in the heat of that moment), its drafters responded to objections from members of the British judiciary by saying that the Human Rights Act 1998 would take priority over it, and that it would be interpreted in its light. This has not occurred.
Within the last three years the British journalist Richard Medhurst, the British politician and leader of a national political party George Galloway, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, and the Professor Emeritus of Russian history at the University of Kent Richard Sakwa – to give just four examples of people known to me – have been stopped at the UK border on re-entry to the UK from abroad.
They have been detained for up to a day under the Terrorism Act, which means not being arrested, yet not being free to leave. Since they have not been arrested they have no right to a lawyer, no right to remain silent, and no permission to inform family members where they are. Their devices were searched, and they were released without charge.
All are certain that this related to their recently expressed, lawful opinions on Palestine or Russia – and that it was done purely to intimidate them – in which it has been, in some cases, partially successful. Not by silencing them, but by making them reluctant to travel to or from the UK.
In the 1880s, when the UK first formulated an Official Secrets Act in the runup to WWI, it contained a public interest defence. In 1911 this was removed, but the principle was still widely applied, which was why when Clive Ponting, a Thatcher-era civil servant, leaked evidence that the British government had lied about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War, a jury acquitted him under the public interest defence. That was doubtless why the next iteration of the Official Secrets Act, 1989, explicitly ruled out the public interest defence. Finally, of course, the right to protest has been curbed by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, and the Public Order Act 2023.
In the US: in 1971 a Pentagon Official, Daniel Ellsberg, leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War which showed that the US involvement in the war was pre-meditated. The US government’s injunction against the New York Times for publishing this material was struck down on First Amendment grounds. Such a decision is far less likely today.
In 2002 John Kiriakou, a CIA operative in charge of counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan, was given the opportunity to be trained in enhanced interrogation techniques. He declined. Of the other twelve of his colleagues who were asked, all accepted, and not one has ever been prosecuted for the torture that they then committed. However, John spent two and a half years in federal prison, after accepting a plea bargain, for speaking to journalists about what took place, after facing charges under (a novel interpretation of) the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act of 1917 never had any public interest defence, and during the Obama era it was expanded to prosecute whistleblowers. It was used against both Chelsea Manning, who leaked evidence of war crimes, and Julian Assange, who never hacked or leaked anything but only published such materials. In Assange’s case, his persecution was done with the cooperation of the UK courts, bending numerous principles of UK law in the process.
The major tech companies are closely involved with the US government and security services, and practice censorship according to this influence – especially, it turns out, against people on the left, and, recently, defenders of Palestine. Indeed, precisely because the US government is unable to censor because of the First Amendment, it outsources its censoring to these companies – hence the extraordinary protections from anti-trust laws, and publisher liability, that it affords them. The Twitter Files, released by Elon Musk when he bought Twitter, revealed that Twitter had been taking instructions from the FBI as to who should be deplatformed. Yet, for his own part, Musk has said that he is in contact with the US intelligence community every single day.
I would like to finish with a case from the EU. It concerns Jacques Baud, currently a Swiss military analyst and formerly a senior Swiss army officer who had worked with NATO. He has recently critiqued Western policy towards Ukraine. At the end of 2025 he was sanctioned by the EU for expressing views that had the effect of supporting an enemy power. This has, as intended, destroyed his life economically and otherwise.
What is so sinister about the sanctioning of individuals (especially those residing in the countries doing the sanctioning; Baud lived in Brussels) is that, unlike their prosecution under any legislation however oppressive, it completely evades due process. Jacques Baud had no trial, no representation, no defence, no possibility of appeal. Nor was there any charge. He had not broken, nor was he alleged to have broken, any law. His life has been made unfeasible solely for the peaceful expression of his political views (to use the phrasing of Amnesty International’s definition of a prisoner of conscience).
This is tyranny.
