Censorship is far more dangerous than free speech

So widespread is the word ‘dangerous’ in film titles, lyrics and adverts that it is easy to lose sight of its principal meaning. When in his new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, Princeton history professor Fara Dabhoiwala calls free speech a ‘dangerous’ idea, one might be forgiven for thinking that he is calling it exciting, provocative or liberating. He isn’t. He means that it is something that might put you, quite literally, in danger.

‘Throughout history’, Dabhoiwala writes, free speech has been manipulated ‘by the powerful, the malicious and the self-interested – for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth’. Words ‘can be at least as damaging as physical blows’, he says. They can ‘perpetuate sexual and racial discrimination, fuel religious persecution, sow social and political division, undermine legitimate political and scientific authority, or pave the way for violence’. Free speech floods the public sphere with ‘hatred and slander, the poison of untruth and the politics of demagoguery’, he warns. Dabhoiwala blames free speech for everything from genocides in Asia to the election of Donald Trump. The rise of X, formerly Twitter, and other unregulated social-media platforms has been ‘disastrous’, he says.

Dabhoiwala’s book belongs to that category of history written not so much to illuminate the past as to make a point about the present. The author was born in Britain, but it is the free-speech culture of the United States that he is most contemptuous of. Like a kind of obverse JD Vance, he comes from a supposedly more enlightened Europe bearing hard truths about how Americans have got free speech badly wrong. Throughout the book, he makes no effort to disguise his biases. He casts those who oppose restraints on expression as ‘free-speech warriors’ who take an ‘absolutist’ or ‘populist’ approach. When he finds an example of censorship that matches his own worldview, he can’t help but emit a cheer of approval. Citing a Danish law that prohibits the publication of material that might be deemed degrading of race, sexuality or religion, Dabhoiwala trills, ‘That is not what the right of free speech is for’.

This history – such as it is – presents two opposing visions of free speech. On the one hand, there is the European version articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in revolutionary France, and later found in the European Convention on Human Rights and many national constitutions. This states that freedom of speech is permissible so far as the law allows, and that governments might restrain it for the ‘public good’, however defined. On the other hand, there is the American version, manifest in contemporary interpretations of the First Amendment, in which no official check on speech is acceptable other than to prevent imminent violence. Dabhoiwala traces this view back through the decisions of the US Supreme Court, the writings of John Stuart Mill and the authors of the US Constitution to an obscure set of essays known as Cato’s Letters. These were written in early 18th-century London by two journalists, who proclaimed, ‘Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man’.

Any disinterested observer might conclude that only the second of these comes close to resembling freedom of speech as commonly understood. Dabhoiwala, however, is at pains to show the opposite. His approach is not so much to play the ball as the man. He flays each and every proponent of the maximalist interpretation of free speech in the hope that their arguments will die alongside their reputations. The authors of Cato’s Letters, he tells us, were corrupt, mercenary, hypocritical hacks. Mill and the Founding Fathers were complicit in imperialism, slavery and racism. The justices of the Supreme Court, he claims, have been wantonly inconsistent in their reading of the First Amendment. It was, apparently, only ‘a historical accident’ that the First Amendment, with its crisp statement of principle (‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech’), passed at all, he says. Had they drafted the constitution a few years later, Dabhoiwala suggests, the Founding Fathers would have had the French example to draw on and taken a wiser approach.

What Mill, First Amendment fanboys and other advocates of unrestrained speech fail to grasp, he diagnoses, is ‘the unequal distribution of power’ in societies that uphold free speech. ‘Authority and dominance take many different forms’, he declares. ‘Governments are never the only or even the most powerful arbiters of speech.’ Differences in race, gender and wealth mean that, even when freedom of speech exists at its greatest legal extent, only a rich and powerful minority can ‘shape public discourse’. For Dabhoiwala, it is ultimately socio-economic factors that determine ‘who can speak, and who is silenced; whose voices are amplified, and why’. As a result, he warns, the whole idea of free speech as found in America today is ‘deeply prejudiced’ and ‘deeply rigged’.

The reader might take these claims more seriously if Dabhoiwala lent as much attention to the nefarious influence of government censorship as he lavishes on the ills of inequality. Yet as his book unfolds, it becomes clear that he sees in the state a largely positive role in regulating speech for the purposes of eliminating disinformation, protecting public morals, preventing disorder and curbing the power of social-media companies.

Dabhoiwala has not written a reliable, let alone readable, book. The prose is repetitious, hectoring and anaemic, full of meaningless formulations (‘It signifies that the views expressed have more value than the harm that they perpetrate’), jargon (‘markets need guardrails’) and truisms posing as aphorisms (‘the force of words is not intrinsic’). There are glaring inconsistencies, as he calls the maximalist approach to the First Amendment at various times both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. He also makes no attempt to grasp the central question raised by his book: if free speech must be subordinated to the public good, who defines what the public good actually is?

Dabhoiwala concludes by suggesting that if we want to know how best to regulate speech, then we should look to the academy. Society, he writes, has much to learn from the respectful discourse, peer-review processes and fact-checking found in scholarly settings like Harvard and Princeton. Never mind that the modern university is plagued by censorship, cancel culture and stifling groupthink. If he ever tries his hand at satire, it really could prove dangerous.

David Gelber is an editor at Literary Review.