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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk.
- [01:05]
Farah Daboiwala
Hi, folks.
- [01:05]
Marshall Poe
This is Christy and Ryan, hosts of.
- [01:07]
Farah Daboiwala
Soundscapes NYC, a podcast about the sounds.
- [01:09]
Marshall Poe
Of the 70s that have shaped New York City.
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Uli Bear
Soundscapes NYC has been named a finalist.
- [01:13]
Farah Daboiwala
For the best indie podcast at the 2025 Signal Award. The judges recognized our episode Shining a.
- [01:19]
Marshall Poe
Spotlight on the Forgotten Women of Disco.
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Farah Daboiwala
From Regine Silverberg, who opened the first.
- [01:23]
Marshall Poe
Modern discotheque, to Sharon White, the trailblazing.
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Farah Daboiwala
DJ who broke the gender barriers at the Paradise Garage. You can learn more about the Signal Awards and how to vote for your.
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Uli Bear
Favorites and@vote.signalaward.com and thanks for listening to.
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Farah Daboiwala
Soundscapes right here on the New Books Network.
- [01:49]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:06]
Uli Bear
Think About It. Deep conversations with Uli Bear on big ideas and great books. I'm very excited to have a special guest today, Farah Daboiwala, who is a professor at Princeton University, a historian and senior research scholar. First of all, Farah, welcome to the Think about podcast.
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Farah Daboiwala
Thank you, Lee. I'm excited to be here.
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Uli Bear
So we're here today to talk. You have a book that's coming out in America. It's going to be published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. And already in the title, you kind of give us something to think about. Because mostly we think free speech is a great idea, a positive idea, something that's affirmative. And you go through a kind of historical account of how we have arrived at our particular understandings in different contexts and countries of free speech. And maybe my first question would be, what moved you to write, let's say, yet another book on free speech and some of the people you actually acknowledge as sort of influence or inspirations, like Fred Schauer, Stanley Fish, Catherine McKinnon, they have been on this podcast, and there's, as you know, a very vibrant industry of writing books on free speech. So your forthcoming book, which has come out in England, I understand, but what is free speech history for dangerous idea? What gave you the idea to write a kind of deeper historical account of this idea?
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Farah Daboiwala
Yes, that's a great opening question. Let me say two things before I address the actual question. The first is free speech is a great ideal, and it is something that we rightly value and that does distinguish free societies from unfree societies. For example, being able to say what you think about religion is better than enforced theocracy. And similarly, freedom of expression is a foundation of free political process. So I don't want to call that into question. The other thing is, just at the outset, I think my book is different because all the people you mentioned before, who are brilliant scholars, only talk about free speech in the here and now, and mainly in the United States at that, which is a particular narrow slice of the subject. And now to come to your question, I came to this project because more than 10 years ago, I published a different book on the history of Western ideas to attitudes to sex. And that landed me talking about that book landed me in various situations where I was censored or deplatformed in England in other Western cultures. And that got me to thinking about what's going on here. I was very interested in the politics of speech in the here and now. Then I went to China because the book was translated into Chinese. And there I really realized that something extraordinary was happening in the world. If you look at it globally, the Chinese were using every single tool of censorship that had ever been invented in the history of humankind, simultaneously here and now. And they were winning in the sense that they were able to shut down even the Internet, which 10 years ago, people thought rather naively, would be just a technology that would free up ideas and the exchange of ideas everywhere. So I came back from China and started thinking about free speech as a culturally contingent thing. Why do we believe this to be so important in the west on the one hand. And on the other hand, why can we never agree on exactly what that means in the west within our cultures, Europe, European cultures, Germany, France, England, and across our cultures? Because even 10 years ago, it was quite clear that Americans had a very different view of this. And I believe as a historian, that.
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Marshall Poe
Really.
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Farah Daboiwala
The best play of answering how we are, how we think in the present is to understand how we got here. But it was deeper than that. It's not just because I'm a historian. I tried to figure out what free speech meant in the present, and I kept finding myself unsatisfied by the answers that you come up with if you take just a purely philosophical or juridical approach, because you come up with many, many different models, and those all depend on different premises, but there's no coherence between them. So as an 18th century historian, I also knew actually that this idea had first become a powerful slogan in the 18th century. So that's where I started digging. And I think if you'll read the book, listeners will find out that it is not just a political question in the here and now, it's also a historical problem. How did we end up with these different regimes, different ways of thinking? And I found out all sorts of extraordinary things along the way that I really hadn't anticipated. And I came to it with an open mind. When I was looking around, I thought, well, some people say they're free speech absolutist. That sounds rather good. Maybe I'm an absolutist. Yes, I believe in freedom. But my trajectory over a decade of research led me to a different conclusion.
- [07:48]
Uli Bear
And I appreciate what you said when you said you wanted to look at how the idea and the ideal that we have today, which actually we all subscribe to, but there is a kind of problem already in the way people describe their own attitude or relationship to free speech. And either you're an absolutist or you're someone who sort of modifies or balances or sees this. Maybe some issue with having all unfettered, unregulated speech. And we'll get to the Internet, which you noticed in China. China has made a very effective, sort of found an effective way of actually regulating speech, despite the fact that everybody assumed, well, the Internet is just going to wipe out all restrictions. And what you said about. People like to say I'm a free speech absolutist. I'd like to say that too about myself, but I found myself on the other side unwittingly and sort of people say, oh, you are the guy who wrote a book against free speech. And I said, no, I wrote a book explaining how free speech ought to work.
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Farah Daboiwala
Yes.
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Uli Bear
And when you get to talk to constitutional lawyers, I've talked to Eugene Wallach, Erwin Chemerinsky, Robert Post, you know, Fred Schauer. They said, oh, absolutely, it's a topic worthy of discussion. It's really important. It's not a self enforcing absolute principle. That's not what absolute means. So let's put your book, first of all, on the side of you are defending free speech as an important thing, but you're trying to get to what is that thing? Is it just the guarantee of democracy? Is it something that allows the human flourishing? Is it something innate to humans? Sort of, in a kind of deep sense, is it allowing religious tolerance? So when you went back to the 18th century, sort of you go into this moment and where these things are worked out, presumably, and they have worked out. If you can talk about this a bit. I think one of your main examples is this book called Cato's Letters by these very brilliant. You call them brilliant, you always keep on calling them brilliant polemicists. And they are. Yes. So what happens there? This is, if you give us a moment of context in England of what is happening and why are they invested in writing these, these journalistic pieces on free speech?
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Farah Daboiwala
Yes. So free speech, as in the modern sense means really essentially that everyone has the right to speak out on matters of public concern. It's really the core of it has always been political free speech, as we might summarize that. And that is a new idea that emerges in the early 18th century in England above all. And it emerges there and then because of a new media environment, a media revolution as it were, the freeing of the press, as people at the time talked about it, the liberty of the press, the first place where that was consciously put into practice and created an entirely new ecosystem. So previously in all cultures, speech had been very highly regulated and the technology of print had been carefully controlled because everyone knew that unfettered lies and slanders and other kinds of harmful speech was something that was very dangerous to individuals and to society. So what's happening in England in the early 18th century is new in that the print, the technology, the print is allowed to be free. And out of this comes this very fast paced new world of political journalism. Especially it's the first world of mass media. Newspapers is also the first place where you have this constant partisan political situation where there are two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, who are Attacking each other all the time. I'm putting it this way, I hope that listeners will hear the resonances with our own time. It's a new media world, it's a partisan world. And in this world, liberty of the press becomes a slogan that people immediately pick up on as something that they can use to forward their own aims. But everyone can see first of all that this is a very subjective slogan, that politicians in opposition are always about liberty of the press and for it. And then when they get into power, they are all about closing things down and the balance. I'm sorry, and talking about the licentiousness of the press, this is the thing, this is how it's conceived of. On the one hand, good expression is liberty, bad expression go too far, it's licentiousness. But no one can theorize it any further because of the final important point, which is everyone can see this is a wholly corrupt partisan world of mud raking and mud slinging in which journalists offer hire and they're just writing in order to make money or in order to further their corrupt political aims. And all the journalists of the time, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, they spend a lot of time exploring this and writing about it. And you know, there's a great quote by Swift that I love about this new world in which lies can be spread even more quickly than before. So that what's changed is just that things have got worse on the front. He says falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it like a man who's thought of a good repartee long after the conversation has ended. So again, everyone can see that this is leading to more fake news, false news, those are phrases people use at the time. And then to come to your people, Katie's letters. There are two journalists in 1721 who are writing the series of partisan political columns anonymously in a weekly newspaper attacking the government. And as part of that they put forward and wholly original new set of very hard edged, absolute ideas about freedom of speech and liberty of the press. And they claim for the first time, they put forward, for the first time really an absolutist model, which is liberty of speech is the foundation of all other liberty and it can never be infringed because governors are always tending to tyranny. And the moment they try and shut people up, you can see it's a slippery slope towards further tyranny. And finally, freedom of speech can never lead to harmful things, libel, you know, lies and things like that, they will slide off the honest man. They will only Stick, you know, slanders only stick if there's some truth. So they're trying, in other words, to put forward a defense of their own column, but they do so as if they were talking kind of dispassionately and putting forward a political theory for all time. And that's how very quickly it's very popular column, how it's taken up and used and weaponized by later opposition journalists and indeed becomes very popular in America, especially as a way of attacking British governors and justifying printing of political attacks.
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Uli Bear
And so on, if I get this right. So in this moment right here, it's still really a debate about the governed, speaking about those who govern them. So it's about a way to ensure that you can criticize people in power and then you kind of, you have kind of a skill to paint very kind of dramatic and really engaging pictures. These are not all noble souls just working for the lofty ideals, you know, that will forever be true. But actually they are self interested, self invested in the process themselves. Journalists making money, but they're sort of arriving at this. And initially, if I'm right, it starts from what you're saying. It's a really a large conversation about can the people actually speak back and address government, which will then resonate. And we'll get to that later, how that plays out in other contexts. But it's not yet really a theory of the human, of humanity, of a personal subject, that our personal opinion must never be oppressed because it compromises us morally or in some other way. It's really about a. Absolutely not.
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Farah Daboiwala
No, you're quite right. That's a very important point. So all early theories of political free speech are that they use the rhetoric of individual speech, as Milton had done when he was talking about religious speech. Katie's letters, partly drawing on that, that, that rhetoric, but actually their argument is about the people collectively, that if you allow freedom of expression, then the people collectively will always speak the truth. And this is predicated on another very dubious presumption that all of 18th century theories of freedom of expression share, which is that the truth is singular. And if you just let people, if you just allow people to freely explore it, then they'll all arrive at the same conclusion. They'll all achieve consensus.
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Uli Bear
Stay with that for a moment because it's such an important idea and it's sort of, to me it sounds really intuitive and it goes, there's a through line from that to what you will discuss later, John Stuart Mill, to someone like Nadine Strossen, who I've had on this podcast who was the head of the aclu, who wrote a well known book. How do you counter hate speech with more speech? There's this assumption that if everybody just talks in this, it'll be raucous, it'll be contentious, it'll be difficult. But at the end of the day, we sort of will all arrive at some consensus of what is true because we all have seen that we are not really reasonable because other people are more persuasive or something. This is the assumption here that if everybody gets to talk, then the truth will sort of win out. Is that the idea?
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Farah Daboiwala
That's the assumption. It's a great enlightenment, optimistic hope in all spheres. The problem with it is that you do need some guardrails to allow that process to reach the desired conclusion, which is truth. You need, for example, everyone to be talking in good faith. You don't want bad faith actors to be muddling things and throwing in lies and misrepresentation for their own purposes. You also need everyone to be equally rational and, you know, to follow the same kind of reasonable steps to arrive at the same conclusion. So it's, it's. I could go on, tell me, tell.
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Uli Bear
Me one or two more. I like these assumptions about how this works because it is a really powerful principle still today. So the assumption is nobody has bad intentions and deliberately lies in obvious cases, actually everybody has roughly equal access to the sphere, which already at that point drops out half of the population. Women are not. But let's see, as an ideal, what else is assumed?
- [18:47]
Farah Daboiwala
Well, I mean, it's related to the ideal, which people, especially in America, still love to use the shorthand, the marketplace of ideas for. So the marketplace of ideas presumes that we're all equally rational individuals, all pursuing the same end. We're all trying to get at the same truth, that none of us are bad faith actors, that we all consciously engage in a collective endeavor to help each other, and that we're walking around this marketplace where all the ideas are freely, equally accessible to us. None of these things is true. None of. None of this actually describes the, you know, the, the sewer through which we daily have to wade in order to make sense of the world. This was true in the 18th century, it's even more true now.
- [19:42]
Uli Bear
And you identify a few things where this runs into a problem. When you were describing that, I thought a court of law sometimes tries to create such a situation where people are sworn to tell the truth, where people have relatively equal time on the stand, where different positions can be articulated without interference or bullying or something like that. This is kind of an ideal situation. But in the real world, you say to create such a situation, they have to disregard certain things. For example, power differentials.
- [20:15]
Farah Daboiwala
Power differentials is a very important one. The media, the role of the media is a very, very important one which people pick up on historically, very early, by the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Any intelligent observer across the world who looks at this problem of free speech can see, and they write about it eloquently and they theorize it, that the mass media do not have as their purpose or their effect enlightening the people or forwarding truth. The mass media have as their purpose and. And effect to sell advertising and to make money for their owners. And so out of that critique, which is an absolutely correct critique, applies even more so today. Out of that critique comes from the 19th century onwards, a really strong series of interventions, theoretical interventions that we've now completely lost sight of, that say, well, freedom of speech needs to be theorized a little bit more than just the rights of the individual as opposed to government. It needs to take into account, first of all, the collective rights of the public to be truthfully informed. That's what the mass media should be doing. If we're talking about political free speech, especially, and we need to put in place ways of encouraging or forcing the mass media to take that responsibility seriously. And we need to take into account more generally, you know, the responsibilities of the mass media, not just to make money, but to do other things in the world. Especially if they're going to hide behind the slogans of liberty of the press and freedom of speech and pretend that that's what they're really about.
- [21:58]
Uli Bear
Before we get to sort of. You said, people theorize this more deeply and start to see maybe this model is a bit too simplistic, let's say. Or not sort of honest. What's the takeaway of these Katoid letters, which you say are very powerful because they're also disseminated widely really quickly. They are read around the world, in the English speaking world. So what is the. But there is a kind of advance. You locate them in history. Say there is something, let's say, not a new idea, but a newly formulated idea that enters into the world. The good part of Cato's letters, before we get to how they limit something or they need to be sort of, you know.
- [22:36]
Farah Daboiwala
Well, I mean, I'm not sure I would call it the good part. The positive lesson is if you write well, if your rhetoric is memorable, you will have a hugely greater effect in the world even after your. After you die, than people who can't write well. So these people are putting forward a theory that is completely bogus. It's completely full of holes, but it sounds great. The headlines can be quoted over and over again. And so in 1776, when the American states are drawing up their declarations of rights at the start of their uprising against the British, they all include, or most of them include, freedom of speech and freedom of the press as one of the fundamental core rights. And all of them take, understandably enough, because it's been the dominant rhetoric for the past few decades in the Americas. They take letters as their template. I mean, many of the phrases. Bulwark of liberty, that's a phrase invented by Thomas Gordon in 1721, that goes straight into these declarations. And then in 1789, when it's thought that there should be a bill of rights for the Federal Constitution that is derived directly from those texts in 1776. So there's a through line from letters, and this is not news. Everyone has who's previously worked on the First Amendment knows this through line right into the words that we now think are so important and so powerful and indeed are in the First Amendment of the American Constitution. What I discovered is why they wrote those words. And that is a horrible story of partisan, mercenary, venal writers just writing for money, trying to get away with murder, ignoring all the big problems of speech that all their compatriots and other journalists are talking about. Slander, libel, misinformation, and the role of the media, and just putting forward this simple template that justifies what they're doing.
- [24:49]
Uli Bear
And this simple template is, in a way, a kind of really usable, abbreviated sentence to say, free speech is really good. Free speech ought to be protected. There are really no risks we need to consider in allowing.
- [25:04]
Farah Daboiwala
Exactly, exactly. There are no risks. There are no harms. And if there are harms, the harms are outweighed vastly by the benefits.
- [25:12]
Uli Bear
By the benefits. Right. And you look at the constitutional conventions, and then you look a little bit about what the states are doing, what is on the books, and then how the founders of the framers of the Constitutions are thinking about, should we just end up where we end up in the Bill of Rights with the First Amendment saying generally, a good guarantees, freedom of the press, free speech, freedom of assembly, et cetera, freedom of association, freedom, often from religion. Here we are. And nothing after that. And you actually spell out how some of the founders said, no, no, no, no, no. We need to actually show how this could become, let's say, what we today call kind of a weaponized sort of right or something like that. It could actually be harmful for the greater good rather than just help us advance in progress.
- [26:00]
Farah Daboiwala
This is one of the most extraordinary discoveries that I made, which is in 1789, there are two major constitutional documents being drawn up on Earth. On one side of the Atlantic in New York, the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. On the other side in Paris, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And it's literally happening at exactly the same time. Now, the Post takes six weeks to go across the Atlantic in each way. So if one party had started or ended slightly earlier, or the other party had started all slightly, or the Post had been faster, the whole of world history would have been completely different because the Americans finish first, and then they send out this text to be ratified, as everyone knows. And takes several years, as everyone also knows, for that to happen. It only becomes the law in 1791, but almost as soon as it's been agreed, the text has initially been agreed. In 1789, news reaches the Eastern seaboard of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. And people read in their news. They open their newspapers and read everywhere, New York and Philadelphia and Boston, that the French have come up with a different formulation, which is basically, everyone, all citizens have the right to freedom of expression, but they should use this responsibly. They should not abuse it, and they should be held responsible for the abuse of this, this right.
- [27:27]
Uli Bear
And the figures in here. Jefferson is in Paris, is in Paris.
- [27:33]
Farah Daboiwala
Jefferson is writing back and forth saying, hang on, Madison, that formulation you've sent me, which is what we end up with, isn't enough. You also need to put in that people should be held responsible. For example, as I think he puts it, false facts, like lies, that's not okay. And slanders. Everyone knows in this society, everyone has known for thousands of years across the world, not just in the west, that lies can be dangerous to individuals. They can destroy their reputation, and they can be dangerous to societies. They can cause riots and bloodshed and pogroms and killings on a mass scale. Europeans have lived through this very recently, in the 18th century. They all know this. And so Jefferson is an example of someone who's trying to put this into the theory of free speech. It doesn't work. His letter doesn't arrive in time. But In Philadelphia in 1789, the citizens of Pennsylvania are meeting simultaneously to ratify the Bill of Rights, and in the same building to draw up a revised new state declaration of Rights and Constitution. Like many other states, they believe that what they wrote in 1776 was all well and good, but it needs to be updated. And they have left us completely unnoticed until now. The longest, fullest debates on what freedom of speech should mean in early America that we have, they literally look at the text of the First Amendment and discuss briefly whether they should just put that text into their revised state declaration. They all agree no, that's a useless text compared to the much more sophisticated new French formulation that everyone has been reading about. They put the text of the French Declaration of Rights and how it balances rights and responsibilities into their state constitution. And they go further and they discuss exactly what kind of speech should be free. And it's really only at this point, the speech about public affairs or public individuals, not about anything other than that. It's a very defined sphere of discourse and it should not be full of lies and it shouldn't be full of untruthful. That is not free speech. And every single other American state after 1789 that similarly revises its declaration or constitution takes the same view, adopts the French balance model, rejects the unilateral absolutism of the First Amendment. This is a completely unknown untold story about American free speech attitudes until the 1960s, when things begin to change.
- [30:28]
Uli Bear
And I just want to stay with this moment sort of far listener. So here we have the federal. And I'm kind of, you know, I hope I'm getting this right sort of in my. Sort of, you know, I'm not a historian, not a constitutional lawyer, trying to read. I like to read these things. So the federal government puts in this rule, our First Amendment, which is not going to be revised. So we're just speculating here what could have happened. And you just said, history would have been different. Actually, your story. And that's a big statement. So they're saying all speech must be absolutely protected from government interference. We have a very famous Supreme Court justice in the 1950s who has a Constitution, makes people read it out and say, no law. And then he said, thank you, I'm done. Meaning we cannot interfere. All speech is permitted. That's the First Amendment as we know it. That's considered American. That is the safeguard, the pillar of our democracy. I've asked a lot of people over the last couple years, would America end if we changed that? And they said, no, it wouldn't end. It would be different. But for A lot of people, it would not be America. It would not be constitutional. It wouldn't be our most cherished liberty. And you're saying the states, in deciding how they ought to be governed, which at that point is a really massive kind of project, this federalist, anti federalist idea. Should the states be governed by the Washington government or just by their own state governments? They're saying, well, if we allow all this speech, the way they're framing it, there's a huge risk because it could actually damage. And what is the real fear? They see that the French declaration kind of contains. What is the threat that they see in this, this shorter formulation of what the First Amendment protects?
- [32:05]
Farah Daboiwala
Well, they don't want unfettered lies and slanders to pollute public discourse. It's as simple as that. And they see that that's happening. This is a live issue in the early American Republic with newspapers and partisan, you know, journalism in the same way as it had been in England throughout the 18th century. People can see that actually there's a lot of speech. One great example of this at the time is Benjamin Franklin writes a column in the Pennsylvania newspaper saying, yeah, I'm in favor of adopting this balanced model that's come over from France because no one agrees on what free speech means. And I don't have the answer, but it certainly shouldn't mean lying and slandering each other in the name of free speech. That's certainly not what it is. There are so many ironies, to go back to your question about levels of government. There's so many ironies in the history, the long history of the First Amendment. One of the most basic ones is that how we now understand and interpret the First Amendment is exactly the opposite of how it was originally meant to be understood. And that's, you know, and so for if there are any originalists out there, I'm sorry, but that's really not going to work. Originally, it is literally just a limitation on the federal government's ability to police political speech. But that's meant to leave everything rightly and properly to the states. That's where these things are meant to be properly regulated. And that's why it takes this very curious, bizarre form of just a negative prohibition. The other thing that's bizarre that Americans don't really realize is the First Amendment does not give citizens any right. It really is only a negative on government, government policy. So that's why it says, congress shall make no law. That's meant to be interpreted literally. But of course, in any sphere where Congress is not the rule maker. It doesn't apply. So there are many, many ironies. That's the most basic.
- [34:22]
Uli Bear
And from that moment in your book, you sort of trace, if I get this right, sort of this history evolves. 19th century. You go in three different directions. You go sort of how England actually works, engagement from, let's say, Cato's letters or Milton here in Free Speech, and especially how it plays that out while holding, you know, countries in subjugation, the colonial rule, especially in India, while America works this out, and you keep on pointing out America is at that point a slaveholding society that condones the oppression and limitation of individuals according to some other principle. And then you get to sort of John Stuart Mill, who is often cited in his treatise on Liberty as sort of the free speech sort of moral thinker for our time. I had Stanley Fish on this podcast here, who pointed out, because he's a polemicist and quiet, categorically, he says, the worst philosopher on record, John Stuart Mill, do not read On Liberty and think you're going to get anything from it. You go a bit deeper in a different direction and you say, if I can sort of, for listeners say this, the scope of your argument is the 19th century. They are trying to work out what is speech in relation to power by these very powerful emerging nations or established nations, England established, United States emerging, that have a fundamental contradiction in them. One holds a colonial empire, the other one holds people enslaved. And you say, this is a key for us to understand what's at stake. It's not the answer, but it's a key. And can you sort of explain why you went that trajectory to map out these different stories?
- [35:59]
Farah Daboiwala
Yeah, I think for two reasons. The first is if you just look at the history, if you investigate it as I did, and look at where these ideas originate about political free speech, then you see that the same people, the same kinds of people in the 18th century are formulating these very powerful, rhetorically beautiful models of freedom of expression, free speech, as opposed to slavery, as they over and over use the. Use the dichotomy at the same time they're doing that, and then they're going around the world telling other people to shut up because their voices are not to be listened to. They tell, you know, women should shut up, brown people should shut up, black people should shut up, natives should shut up. You know, indigenous people should shut up. Slaves should especially shut up. And so the second point that I arrived at, the second reason I go into this so deeply, is that the more I looked into this, the more I realized this is not a bug. This is not some kind of byproduct of a theory being put into place. And then in those times, things were different, and now we've shed some of that baggage. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's absolutely central to how these things are theorized, that certain voices count and other voices don't. Sometimes that theorizing is on the surface and it's easy to see. Other times it's not easy to see at all. But it's always there. It's there in Katie's letters, for example, in how they talk about slavery and how they talk about, you know, enslaved people and how they talk about men and women. And it's equally there in how freedom of speech is theorized. Throughout the 19th century in the Americas. In the United States, for example, speech about slavery is the most hotly debated topic. Anyway, I talk about that in ways that I think people will find interesting and insightful. But then to come to Mill, it's absolutely there in Mill, because Mill is not only a great liberal philosopher, but at the same time spends his life as a colonial propagandist and administrator of the East India Company's rule over India. And that tension has been very fruitfully explored by other historians, but no one's really looked at how it affects his theory of free speech. And it is absolutely central to it, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because he's a great writer. I've read him over my life with great profit, and he's inspiring in many ways. But the theory of speech, to my astonishment, because I'd read it, as I said many times, is full of holes.
- [38:45]
Uli Bear
I want to stay with two things. First, we'll get to Mill in a moment, and where the kind of holds or where he glosses over something that is a really major tension still today. But firstly, to just say for a moment, you're not saying, well, these people are products of their time. They have a worldview that we find, you know, most of us find reprehensible and would dismiss us. You know, we've overcome. You're actually saying they're theorizing, retains some of these and actually bakes it in. It's not just like we can say the founders, so Washington, you know, own slaves, you know, Jefferson owns, like, so just there's flawed as individuals, but people say, well, flawed as individuals, but the theory is majestic and a great promise, and we can separate and we have to get into this debate now. But in some ways, what you're saying, the thing that's baked in. What is the thing? What is the. What you found that actually free speech contains. Yeah, something.
- [39:42]
Farah Daboiwala
Yes, it's really, it's. It. I don't want to. I. Let me be clear here. Free speech is a powerful and valuable slogan, I think, and I say slogan partly to. To make clear that it's an incoherent theory, but it can be used powerfully. It's a slogan or an ideal that many oppressed groups have used and still use today for reasons and values that I admire. So it's a good thing. The problem is, and I think really the problem is the under theorizing. So much of this is invisible in the wording, but the basic point is speech. And freedom of speech is never just about the words. It's always about who is speaking, why are they speaking, to whom are they speaking, what's the medium, what's the effect, what's the audience. That's how in practice, we conceive of it and theorize it and use it. And so if you look at how free speech is theorized and put into practice throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it's always the case that the powerful have greater freedom. And that freedom of speech is a weaponized slogan that's used to disempower other people or to silence voices as much as it's used to empower them. So that's what I mean by. It's baked into the very marrow of the concept. Just like, you know, Elon Musk can, you know, have a giant platform where he is massively censoring voices he doesn't agree with and amplifying his own voice, but yet hide behind the notion that somehow he's an avatar of free speech.
- [41:35]
Uli Bear
Before we get to sort of the contemporary moment. John Stuart Mill, you say he leaves two or three things, really, he glosses over or he skips over them, and they're kind of worth looking at more closely, especially the relation between thought and speech and speech and action. And that is. That is still a debate in both insurance prudence and in the real world, whether speech actually is a form of action or not. And you sort of show how in the Treatise on Liberty, he doesn't spend a lot of time with that. He just moves right along.
- [42:06]
Farah Daboiwala
He moves right along because it's. Because it would. It completely undermines his headline claims. I mean, his headline claims. Let's actually just pause and I want to bring out what is so original about John Stuart Mill and valuable and why he is rightly thought of as a major theorist on the subject, which is he's the first person to theorize free speech fully in secular terms as a individual right. People have theorized it for religious free speech as an individual right for a long time. As we discussed earlier in the Notions of political free speech generally tended to believe that this was about public opinion, the people collectively. And Mill knows that literature very well. His father had been a foremost theorist of it. He grows up thinking and taking for granted all of those promises. But he wants to do something different and something new, which is to point out the value of more generally, what he calls experiments in living, that people should be left to live their lives as they want to without being forced into unnecessary intellectual and social conformity. This is a major, major theme that preoccupies him for understandable reasons, because he is a heterodox thinker who spent his life being criticized for his views on women's rights, on sexual freedom, all number of things. So he says people should be left in peace unless their behavior harms another person. That's the core of his idea about liberty. And it's a very valuable, useful way of putting it. The problem is that he starts off. The problem is how to turn this into a. Into a theory of free speech, which he tries, but in my view, fails to do. The first thing is he has to acknowledge right at the outset that of course, speech is not a selfish action, it's an other regarding action. It's a social act. It's always about communicating with other people. So he acknowledges that, but then he has to pretend that. And he literally just has two sentences where he puts this forward and then just leaves it, that there is no. That is not an other regarding action. That in fact, it's more like thinking. So thought and speech for him have to be treated the same. You can't stop someone thinking a heterodox thought, and therefore you can't stop them expressing it. And that's a really, you know, that's. That's a really weak justification for what is a major, major attempt to say that people should be allowed to say whatever they like. And in order to do that, he also has to then claim that speech is not an action at all. It's like thought just happens within the individual, doesn't affect other people, and that's just not true. And all previous attempts to grapple with the theory of free speech had to grapple with that. Mill doesn't really want to, because partly also he's not really thinking about, I think. I think he's thinking about discussions and disputes about things that he genuinely doesn't believe to be harmful. He's not thinking about political speech so much. He's thinking about arguments about religion or arguments about marriage or arguments about things that he truly believes. A diversity of opinion cannot harm society. And Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music. Limu Save yourself money today.
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- [47:17]
Uli Bear
And you, you sort of this shift, sort of let's say to move free speech from Cato's letters and then sort of that's about freedom of the press, of the press and the government. Then you have the First Amendment, the 1790s, the beginning of United States where it's really a political right and really is concerned only as you said, as a negative right. The government cannot stop you from saying certain things. And then you go into the psychology of what it means, experiments of living that that should be. We should have as much leeway as we can there. And before we move sort of where this plays out in the 20th century you also chronicle the history of free speech in the subcontinent of India, sort of which at that point includes Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, all those regions today different countries. How did the British actually export their free speech model to this region of the world do they bring that along with them with their colonial.
- [48:13]
Farah Daboiwala
Well, Mill is a great example of this. And of course, as I said before, he's an active administrator. So the British model which he epitomizes and his theory epitomizes is that advanced nations like the British are rational actors in the world. And so they rightly enjoy and should enjoy and continue to enjoy and develop and champion the greatest liberty of the press the world has ever seen. But this is not appropriate for backward peoples like they say the Indians are. And so they should not be allowed equivalent freedoms of expression or of the press. And so Mill quite literally at the beginning of his treatise, says, of course, everything I'm going to say applies to rational adult civilizations, but not to childlike civilizations. And I think that's telling because it relates to the problems of his model. What he essentially is saying is if people are rational, then they can use this freedom because it won't cause harm, because they are rational. But if they are not rational, if they're childlike, then they're governed by passions. Horrible things will occur. If they're allowed complete freedom of expression, they will start slandering and murdering each other. His earliest and strongest critics, whom we now don't read anymore because they didn't write as well as Mill did. But for example, James Fitzsim Steven is coruscating about Mill's, you know, vacuousness here. He says it's just not true that societies can be divided up into the adult and the immature, or that in the one people are rational and the other people aren't. He says, look at Britain today. It's not true that the majority of the population, you know, is free discoursing on rational principles at all. It's just a small minority of people who behave in this way. Others behave in that way. That's true in all societies. So it's a telling connection between the flaws in Mill's overall theory and his very colonial outlook on civilization, rationality and so on.
- [50:34]
Uli Bear
But does this make us look at these grand philosophies of free speech that simply, they work well as long as they don't acknowledge power, they don't acknowledge context, and they sort of stipulate a hypothetical rational agent subject. And you know, I teach at a large university, as you do, and I have colleagues who actually have models of rational agents. And then one of my colleagues in the economics department, he said, yes, we've discovered that sometimes people act against their own self interest. And I said, and this is a really good friend of mine, Andrew Kaplan, have you heard of Freud? And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually now involving psychologists in our studies, like Freud was not important. That's not something they read. But yeah, so is this, is this just. This is not just to say, okay, these models are written by people who are, you know, who are sort of blinkered in this way. But when we go into the 20th century and you chronicle how the First Amendment is actually not cited by the US Supreme Court until 1919 or 20, which is the entire 19th century, it's never mentioned once in jurisprudence, it is not regulating American public life. And then it becomes this big thing. And you sort of map out how in the United States the First Amendment is used and what shifts. And it's a big story. It's from 1920 till 2025. But the First Amendment is still assumed to be protecting individuals. So they imbibe this John Stuart Mill idea. That's individuals, human flourishing, experiments and living. It's also supposed to protect dissent and criticism of the government. That's, let's say, 100 years before that. And what happens in the 20th century with this grand ideal, as you said, which is vitally important for all of us.
- [52:22]
Farah Daboiwala
You know, let me try and make it as simple as possible, and let me, let me connect with John Stuart Mill here, because one thing that's really striking and that I hope people will take on board if they read my book, is that if you look at John Stuart Mill, who writes on Liberty in 1859, what. He doesn't mention one of the big gaps in his theory. He doesn't mention the role of the mass media. The role of the mass media in shaping public opinion is a very telling. That he just takes for granted that this is a benign force and that it's not really relevant except when he looks at India and someone, you know, asks him, what do you think of the press in India? And he says, oh, no, that's all. That's not representative of public opinion. There is no, we can't talk about public opinion in India because the press is just in hand in the hands of rich people who are pursuing their own ends. And it's bizarre that he. Well, it's telling that he should say that because it's indicative of a particularly Anglo Saxon, Anglo American view. But at the same time, across Europe in 1859, there are very, very serious theorists and critics of that way of thinking who are directly addressing the problem of the mass media. Out of that comes, for example, the early socialist critiques of the mass media as being perverted by capitalism and money, and that we need to think differently about this. And these critiques are also widely spread amongst American socialists and American communists. And so the Supreme Court in 1919 first takes up and applies the First Amendment. It's an optical illusion to think that they do that. Then for the first time, they finally cave in to decades of pressure by American socialists and their lawyers who say, actually this is relevant to our struggles for the rights of strikers and rights of workers and the rights of socialists like Eugene Debs to organize. And so another one of the ironies of the First Amendment that is unnoticed is that this is reanimated as a important text by its critics, really by the critics of capitalism. But then, perversely, two things happen. The first is that this criticism is actually taken on board seriously by the Supreme Court as part of the reconfiguration of politics and economics and thinking more generally of the New Deal era. And the critique that the media are not acting in the public interest and should be forced to is seriously entertained and gets into Supreme Court jurisprudence by the 1940s. And they are then also rethinking the First Amendment and free speech as needing to be thought of in terms of the collective rights of the people, of the citizens. And this is in parallel with what's happening in Europe. At the same time, if you look at the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Man that's drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt and her team at the end of 1940s, it incorporates in its definition of free speech two things that by then are shared across on both sides of the Atlantic. First, the idea that rights and responsibilities need to be balanced in the case of free speech, as in other rights. And secondly, which is which we don't notice anymore. That is, there's also, it includes a right to truthful information, the rights of citizens to be truthfully informed. And that's about the responsibilities of the mass media. Okay, so that's the first thing that happens. Actually, there are two more things that happened. Sadly, the second thing that happens at the same time as this is that because the First Amendment becomes such a powerful tool because the Supreme Court uses it and says now it does apply increasingly widely, it immediately becomes weaponized by, say, corporations and business people who also want a fail safe legal card to play when they're subjected to regulation. So first, newspaper businesses and then others start to say, well, actually, I don't think I should be regulated in the public good because I have a First Amendment right to, to do this or do that or that. So the business, you know, the corporate takeover of the First Amendment, as it's now rightly been termed, has a very long history. And it's again about power and law and how these things are used and weaponized in ways that we don't necessarily always notice when we think of individual rights in the government and so on. Okay. And the final story is that the ways in which American and European attitudes to free speech, in terms of balancing rights and responsibilities and the collective rights of the people and so on, had been running in parallel, that then shockingly, suddenly comes to an end beginning in the 1960s. And the main reason for that is simply the Cold War. It's that Americans start to retrench away from anything that smacks of collective ideology or collective rights and back on the simple, safer seeming notion that individual freedom is what made America great, what distinguishes us from the Soviets, and that all our laws should be interpreted in accordance with that. And from then you get this, what I've called the libertarian swerve, this increasingly simplistic falling back on a very, very naive and literal meaning reading of what the First Amendment might mean.
- [58:31]
Uli Bear
And this libertarian, I think, for sort of laying out these three different sort of trends. And from the 60s on this libertarian understanding where we are probably today, the court starts to decide. And what you said earlier, one thing I think, why your book is really useful for a lot of people, how the people who actually want to use the First Amendment, say in the 1920s to defend ideas that are controversial, that should be protected, that the government is trying to shut down, and then they shift and the interpretation shifts. So I think there's a lesson to be learned from the rights we cherish and the rights we have. They can be turned against us. What we today say really easily that things are weaponized. When I started this podcast, I think six years ago, this term wasn't really used as much. And actually a weaponized First Amendment was used by Elena Kagan, I think, for the first time in a dissent in the 2000 and 20s or something. It wasn't really a category. The First Amendment couldn't be weaponized because it was inherently sort of open content, neutral viewpoint, neutral, et cetera. And then what you're showing, this neutrality actually ironically allows it to be weaponized by different groups who have different interests. So that's a really major takeaway from your book to sort of say when people are sort of saying, oh, I'm shocked and cannot believe the hypocrisy of people who are free speech absolutists and Pull books from libraries, you know, suppress entire words as catalog of words you can't use, etc. They said they shouldn't be shocked. This has actually been set up. There's a way in which the First Amendment, which has been narrowed and allows that to happen. So it's not. They are insincere. This is the first time people are doing this. People have done this for a long time. And I think your book gives a kind of history of how we arrived here. And let's see, you know, where are we today sort of in terms of, you know, your book ends on kind of we have to ask different kinds of questions rather than is the First Amendment good for us? And I'm saying what is freedom actually? Whose freedom is being protected? How do we actually incorporate context without making it dependent on me or you having particular positions and perspectives, saying, I'm going to be the person to decide what's right or not. Where do you see this today? As you know, it's 2025 and you know, we have you mentioned, you talk in your book about the rise of cancel culture. You talk in your book about that. We live in an era also of government censorship. As I said, libraries are being told the Library of Congress, the, the head librarian of Library of Congress was removed from her office because presumably she put the wrong books in the library, made them available. And that was done under a different reason, sort of protecting all just because.
- [61:20]
Farah Daboiwala
She was a black woman. Because speech is never just about the content. It's always about the speaker as well.
- [61:26]
Uli Bear
Yeah. And so are we now in a mode to say we can just throw our hands in despair and say these people are corrupt and abusing this principle, or are they in a long tradition of people who use this, this very narrow conception of free speech without consideration of responsibilities or consequences? And that makes it into a really useful tool. I mean, Citizens United, which Floyd Abrams, who wrote a book called the Soul of the First Amendment, still defends today that he thinks money is a form of speech, but speech is not action.
- [61:58]
Farah Daboiwala
Okay, so a lot of questions and I hope people will read the book for the full answers. But let me just give you some, some thought provoking answers in brief. One is that this process of the weaponization of free speech is not unique to the United States. It's gone further in the United States because since the 1960s, there's been this globally unique libertarian absolutist rhetoric that's driven the jurisprudence partly also, I have to say, because of noble reasons. The noble reason is everyone hates the balancing model, because it's so obviously subjective, everyone wishes that the rules of speech could be clearer and simpler. The American jurisprudence since the 1960s has tried to achieve that. The problem is it's a dead end, because it only works by stripping out everything that communication really is always about. It strips out all of the context, strips out questions about harm, it strips out questions about the public good. And so what you end up with really is just a husk. And then it's easier to weaponize. So that's one thing. The second point is it's always been a weaponized slogan ever since its invention. All societies struggle with this. But the American approach, I think, has led us into particularly dangerous territory. Another point related to that is ignoring the role of the media. And again, the American story is instructive in a negative way because of the way that everywhere, including in America, the mass media are regulated and were regulated from the beginning onwards because everyone could see these are powerful tools of indoctrination. But then in the 1990s, at the point at which the Internet's foundational laws are drawn up in America, it's the moment of peak libertarian free market ideology, where everyone thinks, A, the government should get out of the way of everything and markets will give us the truth everywhere. And B, everyone thinks the liberal Western model has triumphed over the fall of communism. And so literally, as people will know, probably, Internet companies are given completely carte blanche. They may censor, on the one hand as much as they like, on the other hand, they are absolutely not responsible for anything they publish. And so we've not been able to think of them as publishers, which is what they are. And so they get away with murder. That used to be just American problem. Now they're exporting it around the world. But the good news is, as my book shows, there are many, many richer, fuller, more sophisticated ways of thinking about free speech that people have evolved over the last 300 years and that we could still recall and learn from. And one very basic insight that runs throughout my book is that free speech is not just one thing. There are many, many different forms of freedom of speech. And that's because freedom of speech can have many different aims, can have many different ends. If you're a comedian, you're usually employing a particular form of freedom of expression. Free speech for jokes is different from that for political speech, because your aim is different. Your aim is to amuse people, entertain them. Lies and untruths and hyperbole are very valuable when it comes to jokes. They are dangerous when it comes to politics. Similarly, scholarly free speech has a very old tradition and that aims at ultimately at the truth. But it's a collective enterprise. It requires rules and regulations, it requires tests of truth. It requires a very, very highly regulated system of quality control. That's how we get at the truth. That's the best free speech model we have that does establish the truth, even if the truth is always contingent. But the fact that the truth is always contingent and unfinished doesn't mean we can just ignore it and neglect it. So if you think that absolute unfettered freedom is the way of arriving at truth, I'm afraid you need to think a bit harder. It's just, it's just a way of making yourself feel morally superior to say I'm a free speech absolutist or free speech is a value in itself. It's not, we have to think always what is free speech for? And the answer to that is multiple can have many different aims and each of those requires different rules to achieve that end.
- [66:52]
Uli Bear
Yeah, thank you. I want to thank you for that and for your book. What is free speech? A history of a Dangerous Idea where you give us a history where these things are being tried out. Some ideas win out over others. They are sort of false starts or abandoned projects that maybe need to be revived. And, and I think what your book does, I think a lot of people now are maybe for the first time, I'm not sure they should have this should be for the first time disturbed that free speech can become a weapon. I think that should have been obvious quite a while ago, but I can tell you, I'm sure you've been met with as many people as I have who are self declared free speech absolutists. And they stop thinking at that moment. Not, and not to blame them for that, but they just feel, well, I got it. Free speech is really ultimately the truth will always win out. People will be persuaded. Rationality is that otherwise who someone is going to be control. And your book shows this has been a vibrant debate and people made decisions along the way. It's not, it just didn't play itself out as it's as a kind of self enforcing principle. So let's hope from this moment they'll get to your book and then I wish you the best of luck in what you're doing with your book now because when you enter into this debate, I think it's still going to take quite a long time for people to not just revert to these simplistic oppositions. You're either forced for free speech or not, sort of. You point out one example, the sedition law in 1789, where you're saying this is a false it's a red herring. You say this is a false debate to say either the state can regulate treasonous speech or the state must allow all speeches. And it's not quite what's at stake here. So I want to thank you for that. The book, again called what Is Free Speech? History of a Dangerous Idea, now available from Harvard University Press. You're up for some really raucous debates, and you have a couple book talks coming out. So I hope people will tune in to to those. And I want to thank you, Farah, for being on the podcast today.
- [68:53]
Farah Daboiwala
Thank you. That was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you.