Professor Farah Dababala (4:36)

Well, it's great to be on again. Thank you for having me.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (4:40)

So let's start very briefly, if we might, with the idea that medieval society had about public policing and the punishment of speech. Why was this? It seems to tell us something about the seriousness of speech in the past, doesn't it?

Professor Farah Dababala (5:00)

Absolutely. So actually, it's not just medieval Christendom, it's around the world, everywhere. Any society around the globe before the 18th century treats speech as a matter of utmost seriousness. And that's because of some things that we no longer agree with, but also some perennial truths about speech. And the first of those is speech is an action. It's an action in the world. When you speak or you write something or publish something, you're trying to have an effect in the world. And pre modern societies were very conscious of what a powerful, potentially powerful Action this could be, and especially because it could be harmful, speech could be harmful to individuals. If you spread lies about an individual and destroy their reputation, especially in face to face societies, that is extremely damaging. There's no more damaging thing that you could do to another person in some respects. And secondly, it can be damaging to the public as a whole. If you spread lies and conspiracy theories, riots and pogroms and worse things can happen. And so the political theories of the time are deeply convinced of this and popular understanding also shares those views. So that a potential harms of speech taken for granted. There are wonderful expressions of this in all the great religions of the world and all the great texts of the era. One from the Old Testament that I particularly think is instructive is the stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh, but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones. In other words, physically harming someone is potentially less dangerous and fundamentally harmful than destroying their reputation. John Donne says something similar. Many times a scorn cuts deeper than a sword. And these, of course, people who know all about swords and the harm that they can bring. So this notion that you need to be on your guard is something that is part of popular culture. And indeed, if you look at medieval litigation and into the 16th and 17th centuries, this only increases. People are always suing each other for bad words, for harming their reputation, for calling them a whore in a circumstance where that might really damage your public reputation for spreading lies about them and so on. And the earliest in the political sphere, the earliest laws against what's called false news date back to the Middle Ages. The first English law that uses that term dates from 1275.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (7:26)

That's so interesting you mentioned. There seems to be increasing in the 16th and 17th centuries, as I alluded in the introduction. Do you think that as we get into what we grandly call the early modern period with things like, I don't know, witchcraft laws around cursing and swearing and slander courts and new crimes of sedition. This seems to have been a period of particular concern around the power of speech.

Professor Farah Dababala (7:49)

Yes. And part of that is to do with the expanding pretensions of monarchs across Europe who are keen to extract more and more tax revenue from their subjects. They're keen to also extract greater religious uniformity, especially in the aftermath of the Reformation. And with that comes a new sharpened attention to the problems of heresy. That's always heresy itself is, of course, and blasphemy are also speech crimes. But this becomes further complicated and politicized by the Reformation. And finally Those monarchs are ever keener to enforce political loyalty and that brings about the new crime, for example, of sedition, very vaguely, always vaguely defined, but that basically means disloyal speech. So if you go to the tavern and you say, oh, Queen Elizabeth, she's just a whore, she's had many children out of wedlock, or the bishops or fornicating, you know, you could be in serious legal trouble for that because that falls under this new approach, which is that you should try and enforce political loyalty and not allow people to spread lies and rumors that are unfounded about their rulers. So now a lot of this is of course bound up with things that we no longer agree with, namely that society is a hierarchy and that those at the top are owed the respect of those below them, and that men and women have different rules, rules of behavior, and that women should shut up and be quiet and not pretend to equality with men and so on. But nonetheless, if we strip away all those differences of social outlook, there remains the basic fact that speech is an action and it can cause harm in the world. And that is how pre modern societies try to deal with it, by regulating as much and increasingly also in new technologies like writing in print.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (9:41)

Given that quite a lot of what you've said is about defending the powerful, how much is this control of speech a top down imposition? Because we have multiple cases of heterodox speech that indicate perhaps that public feeling was uninhibited. Public speech perhaps was uninhibited.

Professor Farah Dababala (9:58)

Yes, yes. I mean, the tricky thing always is trying to read things back from litigation. So most of what we know about popular political opinion and heterodox political and religious opinion comes in fact from legal cases where people were prosecuted for this. So you could spin that both ways. You could say, on the one hand it shows that people are talking out of line very freely. On the other hand you could say, well, it does show that this could land you in serious trouble. And it's not just a top down imposition, of course. These things are heavily. All laws are always implicated in power structures. They apply more to the powerless and to the powerful. But nonetheless, it's also the case, as I said earlier, that ordinary people are always going to law to defend their own reputations. This is something that concerns them personally. It's not just about the powerful guarding their own reputations.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (10:52)

You write that when we celebrate the growth of a public sphere and the rise of public opinion, what we're often actually describing as the growing influence of a deluded and misinformed Public. Why do you say this?

Professor Farah Dababala (11:04)

It's a tragic circumstance. But if you look first of all at the political sphere of the Middle Ages and the premodern period, what informed commentators there are hugely concerned about all the time is the power of misleading rumors and conspiracy theories to agitate people into violence and worse. So that's a thing that people are at the time very concerned with. And if you look at the facts on the ground, it's understandable that they are, because there are endless riots and rumors and pogroms and witch hunts, literally and figuratively, on the basis of clearly untrue information. And the problem is also that untruth spreads very quickly in this society, as it does in every other society. So this is a real problem. And if you look, to take a concrete example, if you look at the British Civil wars and the run up to those, you know, the most catechism bloody episode in the history of Britain in modern, early modern times, what historians now point to is not just the fact that there are two sides which have different views on the nature of the religious settlement and so on, but also to the incredibly powerful toxic effect of rumors and misinformation and misunderstandings and wild conspiracy theories. For example, that the Duke of Buckingham is an evil killer who has already murdered James I and is on his way to usurping the throne and doing away with Charles I. Those are very powerful conspiracy theories. They're amplified by the British monarchy's overseas Catholic propaganda enemies. And they are very powerful. And that's part of what feeds into this toxic kind of stew of misunderstanding and misunderstanding trust that lights the tinder and leads to bloodshed and the civil wars. So we need to take these things seriously. Public opinion is often deluded. Whether or not very tight speech, regulation is the best way of dealing with that is a separate question. But it's undoubtedly true that these are real problems.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (13:19)

It's interesting. I'm going to play devil's ad crit for a second here because you write later in your book of the shift from seeing the mob to seeing the. The public. And so to be rather provocative, are you not rather conceiving of this earlier public in the same way as the elites did then? If we think of them as the.

Professor Farah Dababala (13:36)

Misinformed mob, all these terms are inherently unstable and weaponized. Free speech is not a coherent doctrine. It's a weaponized slogan. It means speech that I believe should be free. Censorship equally is a tendentious political slogan. It means regulation of a kind. I disagree with. Don't think it's justified. And so the boundary between the deluded mob on the one hand, and the rational public trying to figure things out on the other hand, is an equally perennial shifting subjective judgment. I think, looking out in the world today, that there is a lot of mob like deluded behavior, for example, in the sphere of misinformation about vaccinations or indeed about people seeking asylum or any number of subjects, where the facts really become very murky and disappear under an avalanche of often bad faith, spreading of unfounded speculation. On the other hand, I do believe that democratic societies depend on people behaving and trying to form rational, collective judgments in the public sphere. So again, I'm afraid there's no simple answer here. But it is true that sometimes people are deluded, that conspiracy theories spread like wildfire, and that the truth, even if it's never completely settled, is something that you need to prove with evidence. That's the thing. There's a great. I mean, all these things are questions that equally intelligent people in the past have grappled with over and over again. And the point at which people start to tip towards thinking of free speech as a thing that might apply not just in the religious sphere or for scholars. There are lots of older notions of free speech which we talked about, but to politics is the early 18th century in England and especially in London. And that's because that's a moment of exploding new technology of communication, in this case print, and the freeing of print from prior censorship. And I just want to. We can come to that later. But there's a great quote from Jonathan Swift, the great journalist and writer and wit, which goes something like, you know, the lies spread very quickly. Lies, once unleashed on the world, spread like wildfire. And the truth is always very slow. The truth, and this is Swift, the truth always comes limping after like a man who's thought of a clever repartee long after the end of the party. And I think that's a perennial truth.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:12)

L' esprit de scalier.

Professor Farah Dababala (16:14)

Exactly. L' esprit d'. Escalier. So that insight also is not new, but it's again, a perennial truth that if you just allow everything a free for all of lies and misinformation and don't attend to the truth, the truth will not come out on top.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:29)

That's very interesting. Well, we'll get there. Just a second to the early 18th century. Just a few things to say about the 16th and 17th. First, one of the things I'm happy.

Professor Farah Dababala (16:37)

To talk forever about, the 16th and 17th centuries. I mean, it's so rich and so interesting.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (16:41)

Yes, well, one of the things that is particularly striking of this period is that toleration was generally not conceived of as a good thing. You're making me think a lot about terms. And of course, one of the things about the word toleration is it means to put up with something you dislike, and we use it in a completely different way these days. But anyway, in religious terms, even that level of toleration was not considered a good thing in the past. But were there any practical experiments with what we might think of as religious freedom of speech in the 16th and 17th centuries?

Professor Farah Dababala (17:13)

Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a really major change that comes about because of the Reformation and at the Reformation and after it. And so before the Reformation, the basic, the simple picture is that the Catholic Church controls the truth in the religious sphere. They decide what the correct doctrine is, and then the ordinary Christians are supposed to listen to the priests and follow that. And if they step out of line, if they decide to spout heterodoxy, then they will be reasoned with. They will be explained that they're straying from the true path. And if they persist, then they will be treated as heretics. And these are matters of expression and of speech and of freedom. And the presumptions are clear. A, truth is singular, and B, the Church defines it. And C, if you persist in heterodoxy, you will be put to death. And that is not because you yourself are then already damned, but it's to stop this spreading. It's again about speech being an action in the world that can affect other people. If you allow the spread of heresy, you will undermine truth and salvation for everyone. It's the most important thing of all. So that's the mainstream view. That's the orthodox view. And after the Reformation, most Protestant churches continue to uphold that outlook all the way through to the 18th century and indeed through the 18th century in many state churches. That is that the church decides, and deviations are dangerous. But out of the cataclysm of the Reformation also comes a radical Protestant way of thinking about this that's developed over the 16th and 17th centuries, and that is that it's wrong to persecute people for divergent religious opinions for a number of reasons. One is, and the most important, is that only God ultimately knows the true way to salvation. These are not judgments that we can establish truth about as human beings. It's a fallacy we really don't know. All we can do is read the Bible, allow the spirit of Divine inspiration to enter us and discuss with each other what the Bible actually teaches us about the proper way of organizing our churches and organizing our doctrine. This is the strand of radical Protestantism that then leads to people celebrating individual conscience as the ultimate guide to salvation. And there are wonderful continental thinkers who pioneer this Corn hurt in Holland, Castiglio in Italy and in Switzerland. Many of these people are persecuted by their own Protestant churches. But out of it emerges this, by the middle of the 17th century, quite important strand that then gets taken up by the English Puritans. And John Milton's Areopagitica in the middle of the 17th century is a wonderful restatement in English of all these ideas. The point about these is that they can't be immediately seen as equivalent to modern free speech ideology. Even though Milton is often read as just as an old fashioned precursor of the First Amendment or something like that, it's not true at all. First of all, they are very concerned only with devout Protestants who are spiritually inspired. This is not just you can think whatever you like. You have to be acting in good faith and basing yourself on the text of the Bible. And secondly, the limits of what it is possible to argue about the route to salvation have to be spiritual. You can't stray into secular matters. You can't, as John Locke famously then argues at the end of the 17th century. You can't, for example, stand up and say I'm going to create a church where adultery is part of our doctrine and everyone is allowed to sleep with everyone else because that strays into political secular issues that will undermine public order and public morality. Now it's clear to see that that is a, by our standards, subjective definition of where the spiritual and the secular diverge. But nonetheless they're very concerned because they are heterodox. Because everyone is saying from the mainstream, no, you can't let people think for themselves. They have to say, well, we can let them think for themselves. Because this is ultimately harmless to the public at large. It doesn't impinge on public order, it doesn't create untruth. That can be dangerous. It's harmless. In other words.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (21:39)

So there's two distinct shifts there. One is that if it's not harmful for the public as a whole, that is seeing the individual engagement of the conscience with God and not continuing to see religion on the same kind of community scale. I suppose the way that in the 16th century someone believing heresy was going to pollute the rest of the body of the church. And the second thing is that it's challenging authority because it's suggesting that it's no longer you need a priest, you no longer need the church to tell you what to believe. You can decide that yourself. But of course, once you apply that to politics, once it starts to throw off political authority, then the elites have really got a problem.

Professor Farah Dababala (22:25)

Yes, absolutely. And that is kind of one route into what happens in the 18th century and when people start to apply ideas of freedom of expression to the political theory. That does come out of this, partly out of this well established idea that matters of conscience, individuals should be free and external authority can't coerce them. And that's one reason why actually these ideas of free speech become particularly early and strong in Protestant countries more than in Catholic ones.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (23:00)

That's very interesting. Okay, so we've got Milton and Locke suggesting ideas about freedom of expression. But the first modern theory of political free speech comes in a series of columns published in the 1720s. What was new about the ideas here?

Professor Farah Dababala (23:18)

Let me just back up a little bit. In the early 18th century, people start to be very agitated about freedom of speech as a political right. And that happens first of all in England. And that happens there because after the Glorious Revolution and the huge religious and political chaos of deposing a Catholic monarch and safeguarding the Protestant Church of England, the old system of pre publication censorship, which had applied in England as everywhere else, pretty much, whereby controversial texts needed prior approval to be printed, prior approval by the church or by the government that came to be unworkable. It's clearly unworkable if now radical Protestants are part of the political orthodoxy, et cetera, et cetera. So no one can figure out exactly what to do about this, but they know it's unworkable. And so the system lapses in 1695. And out of that lapsing of prior censorship comes an explosion of new media, explosion of print and new forms of print and especially political print. And the key example of that is newspapers. The first freely published mass media are established in London in the 1700s, 1710, 1720s. And this is a new incredibly fast paced political world in which there is also another new thing, partisan politics. The Whigs and the Tories, the first permanent political parties who are constantly throwing mud at each other across the partisan divide. So it's very like today, it's reminiscent of it. And the new thing there for our purposes, is that liberty of the press is what people are now living in. And everyone starts to see that that's actually quite a good thing for them, although their opponents clearly are always abusing it. The political newspapers of the time, Defoe and Swift and all these great journalists are constantly complaining about how lies and misinformation are being spread by the other side. Defoe says at one point, newspapers themselves have created, quote, an explosion of false news, forgery, infamy and absurdity masquerading as fact. Here's that Swift quote. Falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it like a man who's thought of a good repartee long after the end of the party. So everyone is aware that there's something new going on here. New mass media, fast paced news, endless lies and rumors, and that this is related to the liberty of the press. So they start to talk about this in a very vague way. That's to say the liberty of the press is a good thing, but there's too much licentiousness. Licentiousness means abuse of liberty. It's when you go too far. But no one can really put this into a coherent theory. It's clearly a very subjective matter whether you think something is a good example of liberty or a bad example of licentiousness. And again, all the intelligent commentators at the time point out that opposition politicians are always claiming the liberty of the press to say whatever they like. The moment they get into power, they're all about licentiousness. No, no, this is going too far. We need to crack down. So it's a subjective matter balancing liberty against license. Into this mix come the two people that we now should talk about, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. They are two obscure journalists writing anonymously who start up a column called Cato's Letters in the early 1720s. And in that column, in the course of that column, which is mainly just rehashing kind of conventional, in easy to read format, conventional thinkers like Machiavelli and Locke and you know, the deep thought, they're repackaging this for quick columns. They insert four essays on liberty of speech in which they put forward something that is actually not repackaged. It's original to them. And it's basically an argument that liberty of speech is very important foundation of all liberty itself, and that it cannot be abridged at all. The moment you see someone trying to abridge liberty of expression or liberty of press, that's the first sign of incipient tyranny. So they put forward this model, which is very simple. On the one hand, governors are always out to gain more power and to turn into tyrants. On the other hand, the people are always right, the people are always unified in their views. And the people can always spot tyranny a mile away as long as they're allowed to express themselves freely. And so freedom of the press becomes for them the most important thing in holding governors to account. And they then spend a lot of time explaining why it basically cannot ever be abused. Libel, which is the main thing that previous theorists have always worried about, can't really exist, they say, because it's always about the powerless attacking the more powerful. If you spread lies about a powerful person, the public won't believe you, because the public have great judgment. On the other hand, if you attack and criticize a governor for something wrong, then they will be held to account. So it's a very simple system. It's basically justifying their own practices. In this column, Katie's Letters, which is to attack the government of the day from the left. There's a Whig government. They are attacking it for its mismanagement of the economy. They're attacking it supposedly for its incipient tyranny of various kinds. And because they are incredibly unrestrained and call for, you know, the lynching of stockbrokers who have lost money and the people to rise up and to celebrate the assassination of tyrants in the past, wink, wink, because they're so unrestrained, they become very quickly the most red column in the British Isles. And they're incredibly powerful and successful in muck raking and attacking government. But that's not all there is to it. You can ask me.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (29:26)

No, no. In other words, you're saying they're kind of a clickbait of their day in that their position is extreme and interesting and fascinating because of that. But you go on to highlight the corruption, ultimately the hypocrisy underpinning their work. So please explain that and answer me this. Is the whole thing like some great rhetorical game for these thinkers, or were they sort of morally moribund from the beginning, or they ultimately just bought off?

Professor Farah Dababala (29:57)

It's all of those things, I'm afraid. So. It's long been known that Cato's Letters is an immensely important text in the history of free speech. It's really the origin of the first apparently coherent theory. But the first revelation of my book is that it's not coherent, it's deeply biased, it's full of holes, it's avoiding all the real issues of the public sphere at the time that all other serious commentators point to. For example, that all writers at the time are basically corrupt. They're writing for money. They change sides all the time. Newspapers the same. So that's the first point. Their theory doesn't stand up, but because it's packaged so beautifully and rhetorically, so powerful, that's not noticed over time as it gets endlessly reprinted and takes on a life of its own. I mean, their critics notice it at the time, of course, but they don't write so well, they're not republished. And so we're left with this text, which looks like it's embodying timeless wisdom. And that's their rhetorical style as well. They always pretend they're above the fray. They don't say that they're partisan. It's impossible to tell. They're trying to avoid the libel laws. They never attack people by name. But to Canipi readers, it's clear that they than what they're doing. Okay, so that's the first thing. The theory doesn't work. The second thing is, which I discovered to my amazement, they are just playing the game like everyone else. Trenchard and Gordon are writing. First of all, Trenchard is a rich guy. He doesn't need money, but he's deeply pissed off with the Prime Minister, Lord Sunderland, who's refused to give him a seat in Parliament. And he's deeply pissed off about the South Sea crash because he secretly lost a lot of money in that. So those are the two immediate targets of their campaign. That's why they start writing then. They are experienced polemicists in the sphere of religious toleration and religious free speech. And so the way that they start talking about political free speech is clearly just adopting that model and doing away with any limits. But the most revelatory thing is Thomas Gordon, the junior partner. He is not a rich guy. He's just a penniless Scot who's come down south to make his fortune. He's by writing, by doing anything he can. He starts off actually as a spy for the Tory Prime Minister, Robert Harley. And then when Harley is ousted and falls, Thomas Gordon switches sides quickly to ally with some powerful Whigs. That's how he ended up with Trenchard. And then in the course of writing Katie's letters, he comes to the notice of the Ministry. And ministers take him aside and say, hey, look, you are a great writer, but you're wasting your time just attacking us all the time. Why didn't you come and write for us? And he does. He secretly switches sides at the same time as he's running Cato's letters attacking the government, he starts writing anonymously for government propaganda for new newspapers that the Walpole regime establishes or buys up and then ultimately he switches sides. It's his ambition to make his own fortune, and he ends up as Robert Walpole's chief propagandist. And after that he's in charge of people putting out exactly the opposite message to that of Cage's letters as far as free speech is concerned, which is the mob is easily deluded. People are always spreading lies and trying to provoke popular anger. The governors are doing the best that they can, and it's dangerous to allow ordinary citizens to attack them without any restraint, and so on. So it's a wonderful story of undercover duplicity and hypocrisy, but out of it is born a text that then lives on and is very powerful, long after Thomas Gordon himself has died.

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Professor Farah Dababala (34:19)

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (36:43)

And it's powerful in ways that will have long term implications. But there's also some things that you point out about it in this kind of origin story of free speech as a political idea. One is that it's gendered from the beginning. Cato's letters is a male text, you write. So what were the implications of this?

Professor Farah Dababala (37:05)

Well, these go further than just Cato's letters. I mean, the point is that we think about censorship and free speech in quite a simple way. Normally we think of censorship as something clearly artificial. It's something that historians are very used to spotting in the wild. You know, you look at whatever your period or your place and you can see systems of censorship, often because they're explicit and you see that they have a shape, you see that they are like this or like that. It's never the same everywhere. And what we then take for granted is that free speech is simply what emerges if you get rid of censorship. 3 Speech is somehow more natural. And part of the theme of my book is that that is actually not true. Free speech always has a particular shape. The freedoms of speech always, for example, are greater for the powerful than for the less powerful. Secondly, what you can say is always about the person of the speaker as much as about the words. I won't go on about that. But the more basic point is that theories of free speech also have within them always these biases. And so one thing that you can see in Cato's letters is it's very keen to distinguish public speech from private speech. Public speech should be allowed the greatest latitude. Public speech is the foundation of political liberty. Private speech is a completely different matter. And for Cato, for Trenchard and Gordon, this is the the same as the distinction between male speech and female speech Male speech is powerful and important and public. Female speech is meaningless. Nothing, gossip, et cetera. And this runs all the way through their text is not a surprising outlook for an early 18th century Political philosophy written by men. But again, it's propaganda. It's not really a description how the world really is. The implication is that women are not concerned with political affairs and don't engage in the public sphere and shouldn't engage in the public sphere. But the reality of the early 18th century is actually that women are heavily engaged in talking about politics and indeed in writing about politics. You know, it's a period in which feminist and female writers are very powerfully present in the public sphere as journalists, as poets, as philosophers, and indeed in manufacturing newspapers. I mean, no one would have read Cato's letters if it weren't for the female workforce involved in hawking and selling and distributing it. So this notion of the public and the private is a very gendered one, and it's in contradiction with the facts. But that's how these theories always try and smuggle their biases into what we then think is self evident or normal or natural.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (39:50)

And it's also a racialized ideology, you suggest. I mean, obviously this is a period of time in which the practice of transatlantic slavery has really got going. And the language of slavery, to make things even worse, is used as an idiom to discuss the need for freedom of speech, even while that speech is implicated in the enslavement of black people. Why is it not going far enough to say that this is paradoxical?

Professor Farah Dababala (40:18)

It's not going far enough to say it's paradoxical because it's actually again, baked into the worldview. It's fundamental, it's foundational to the worldview of people at the time. So one way of thinking about this simply is that free speech as a political right is invented by the same kinds of European men who then go around the world telling other people to shut up. Women should shut up, natives should shut up, brown people should shut up, black people should shut up. Slaves should especially shut up. And that's not just a matter of different practices. It's again, part of the theory of slavery, the theory of imperialism, that the voices of the colonizers carry more weight are indeed the things that decide the limits of the public sphere, and those of other lesser groups don't count in that sphere. So that's a very explicitly hierarchical, racialized notion of whose voices matter and whose don't. And I became very interested in tracing this because as you say, the 18th century is a period in which global imperialism really explodes. And the British are in the vanguard of claiming that they stand for the greatest liberty the world has ever seen politically. And then the Americans follow that and pick it up. But they are all engaged at the same time in denying liberty to others. So you could see that as the benign way of looking at that as a paradox. I think it goes much deeper than that. It's actually baked into how people think about freedom and who it applies to.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (41:55)

Absolutely. I mean, at the time we've got in Barbados, which is a British colony, enslaved people cannot testify before law. They are silenced. Which suggests that the colonists know that they're equating liberty of speech with white supremacy because they're putting so much effort into silencing enslaved people.

Professor Farah Dababala (42:13)

So they absolutely do. And as I show in my book, this goes all runs all the way through into the 19th and 20th centuries in other ways and other places where speech is always free, speech is always defined in ways that are deeply, deeply politicized.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (42:28)

Can we talk a little bit about the forms and limits of freedom of expression in 18th century states? Perhaps we can consider Frederick the Great of Prussia, who thinks of himself as a philosopher prince who's entertaining Voltaire and Bach at his court. He's surrounding himself with and corresponding with intellectuals. What does freedom of expression mean in Prussia?

Professor Farah Dababala (42:50)

Yes, it's a great example. And I talk in my book about the many ways in which the 18th century, this ideal takes different forms across Europe and indeed across its colonies. So in Prussia is a great example of an enlightened despot who picks on freedom of expression as something that will advance his society, improve it. This is a great Enlightenment ideal that a lot of monarchs latch onto, but only within the limits that he himself is free to set. And those limits are essentially that. You may not criticize the government, you may not criticize him, you may not criticize the principles upon which he rules. On the other hand, he wants to encourage greater criticism and greater open debate about, say, the truths of religion and the power of the church or art and literature and Enlightenment thought more generally. Because one thing that we haven't talked about yet is that this idea of freedom of expression as being a good thing becomes very quickly in the 18th century, bound up with a number of central Enlightenment principles. And that's partly because it has a longer history as a scholarly principle. Even before the 18th century, this notion, the humanists call it libertas philosophandi, the liberty of philosophizing. This is a very ancient scholarly ideal. And it means that scholars should be free to pursue the truth and advance knowledge by talking to each other across national and international boundaries. And so this is the idea that underpins the Republic of Letters. And everyone can see, enlightened people can see that this is a good model for advancing truth, to let clever people figure out things and advance it through free discussion. And so Frederick the Great thinks that this applies in many spheres, and so do many other European governors. But the purpose of that is always to improve society. It's for progress. And the idea that goes hand in hand with that often in the 18th century, is also that the press, liberty, the liberty of the press is a great engine of free expression and progress and the rest of it. But again, it needs to be used with care. You don't want that to spill over into criticism of the government in Frederick's case, or indeed in the Scandinavian territories, which are very early to legislate freedom of expression. They're the first really to embody this in law and in constitutional principle. There you may not criticize the church because they are societies that still believe in a state church and think it's dangerous for people to deviate from that. So free speech always has a peculiar particular shape, depending on the priorities of those who set its limits. And those are endlessly subjective and changeable. That's still the case today.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (45:42)

Is any adoption of freedom of expression, oppress, liberty, etc, underpinned by a fundamental shift away from paternalism to recognizing, through Enlightenment thought, I guess, the rationality of all adults, men at least?

Professor Farah Dababala (46:00)

Yes, I think that is part of why it becomes such a popular ideal in the 18th century. There is this broader shift towards thinking that actually human beings are capable of figuring things out and improving society. And that actually we're no longer looking back to biblical times or to classical times as the pinnacles of civilization. We, the moderns, can actually improve on that. And one way of that is these new principles of empirical approaches to science and to learning more generally. And that depends on a notion of rationality. But again, there are endless debates amongst intelligent people at the time about how far this goes and whether everyone is inherently automatically able to contribute at the same level to public debate, or whether you need to be educated, whether you need to be a man, not a woman, and so on. There isn't a new conception of human nature, but again, it's not straightforward and uniform.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (49:05)

Let's explore then, the impact and reach of Cato's Letters in the American Revolution and the rebellious states. Declaration of Rights what is idiosyncratic about these formulations and how does that impact stretch into the modern day?

Professor Farah Dababala (49:20)

Briefly, yeah, Cage's Letters is endlessly republished from the 1720s, becomes a very popular text in Britain, especially for those who are oppositional politicians who want to stand, who want to claim some kind of theoretical foundation for attacking the government or doing whatever it is that those in authority don't want them to do. On the other hand, it always is counterbalanced by the older notion that actually liberty and license need to be balanced. You need responsibility. So there's lots of alternative ways of thinking of it. In the British Isles, in the American colonies, something similar happens, which is that when the Civil War breaks out in the colonies between the Patriots and the Loyalists from the middle of the 18th century onwards, and I say Civil War advisedly to show that there are really two equal sides here, Cage's Letters becomes especially prominent amongst the ideologies that the patriots espouse, of course, after all, it's understandable they are fighting, in their view, against tyranny. They stand for liberty. And this is a ready made text for them on all sorts of levels for that, not just the free speech. And because it's such a popular text, it's easy to read, it's endlessly publicized, it's already been used by early American newspapers to justify their own practices. Everyone knows it. And so in 1776, at the outset of the Revolution, when the states individually start to draw up their own revolutionary constitutions and declarations of rights, they use this template as a model for how to formulate those. They say liberty of speech is a bulwark of all, liberty can't be infringed, et cetera, et cetera. Now, it's just a rhetorical statement, because what they're saying, which we can't now easily see, is that licentiousness is not okay, but liberty is okay. So it's not really a contentious or partisan way of putting it. It's just an Anglophone way in which everyone agrees that liberty is good and you don't have to spell out that licentiousness is bad. But then what happens in 1789 when the Americans have a national constitution and they want to attach a Bill of Rights to that is much more interesting. In New York, where James Madison and others are drawing up what becomes the First Amendment, they naturally just use the template of the state declarations, which come from Cage's letters. And indeed they sometimes use Bulwark of Liberty and other languages straight from Trenchard and Gordon. And they draw up this simple Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or liberty of the press. And of course, we could go into the weeds here, and I'm not going to, but this just means the national government has no right. Absolutely all of them agree that the states have the right and the obligation to police speech in various ways, and they already have been. But anyway, they use this formulation. What I found really extraordinary is another great discovery I'm quite proud of, is that at the same time as they're drawing this up in New York, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Paris, the French revolutionaries are drawing up their Declaration of Rights, Declaration of the Rights of Man. And this happens exactly at the same time. They are writing to each other, they're in close contact, they're following the are on both sides of the Atlantic, what the others are doing in the newspapers as well as in the actual people drawing up these documents. And the French come up with a formulation that's very different, which is essentially, every citizen has the right to free expression, but not to abuse that. This right needs to be exercised responsibly, and liberty may not extend to abuses as defined by law. So it's a balance explicitly balancing liberty and license. And what no one's noticed before that I found out is that when this text is ratified, it's just a few weeks after the First Amendment has been passed, but still not ratified. It's now First Amendment's text is fixed in 1789. That takes two years for it to be sent around to the states and agreed by them. In that period, all the American states that are concerned with freedom of expression read about this new French declaration, and they say, wow, this is a great way of formulating the principle. We've been having trouble with libel and the limits of political speech and so on. And this formulation captures exactly what we want to do. And so in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is one of the earliest and most influential states, the most important city in the United States. They are in 1789, as it happens, drawing up a revision of their Declaration of Rights. And they take. Take literally the words of the French Declaration, put them in their state declaration, and then go further and start to grapple really seriously with the real problems of the limits of political speech. And this has been completely unnoticed by American historians who are only fixated on the First Amendment. And it's not just in Philadelphia. Once that French template is introduced to Americans, every other state that then revises its constitution or. Or a new state that draws one up from scratch incorporates some version of that French, that balancing formulation. And that's understandable because it is a clearer way of articulating what's at stake when defining freedom of speech. And that's also why every other nation around the world that has ever since the 18th century, formulated free speech as a constitutional right has also taken that balancing approach. And so the First Amendment is. Which actually is a dead letter until the 20th century, is just because it was formulated a few weeks too soon, or the post between Paris and New York wasn't fast enough for them to take account of this new formulation. It remains stuck in that older way of formulating things, which then allows it to be interpreted in increasingly libertarian and absolutist ways over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st century. But Americans early on saw that that was inferior. That's a really important finding, I think.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (55:18)

It is a really important finding. And what you're suggesting Also is that even at the time it was put in the First Amendment, the limits on liberty were implicitly understood. They recognized that there was such a thing as licentiousness, so much so that it didn't need spelling out. But the fact that it. It wasn't spelt out is what now creates the space.

Professor Farah Dababala (55:41)

Yes, indeed. And all the early debates are just about whether the national government has a right to intervene in these things or whether it should just be left to the states. But everyone agrees the states should police licentiousness, and they have been. It starts with the criminalizing of loyalist speech. Even during the Revolution. It's never been an American principle that harmful speech should be allowed. And that's understandable.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (56:04)

I was really struck in your book by the quote from Thomas Paine, who, of course, we associate so much with revolutionary activity in this period, when he says, if every individual is to indulge his private malignancy or his private ambition to denounce at random or without any kind of proof, all confidence will be undermined and all authority be destroyed. It felt very striking, very salutary for today. You know, these arguments have been made before.

Professor Farah Dababala (56:32)

These arguments have been made before, and they're particularly powerful at moments of. Of media revolutions, which, you know, Paine is an example of that. We are living through a similar moment right now.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (56:41)

But the thing is, there still remained categories of unacceptable speech that we wouldn't count as libel or licentiousness. Didn't there? I mean, once again, criticism or even amelioration of slavery is one of those categories.

Professor Farah Dababala (56:54)

Absolutely. And as I show, the earliest people to appeal to the First Amendment in its modern sense, that is a right of every citizen to speak out on matters of public concern, are really the abolitionists. And Frederick Douglass has a great quote at one point where he says, the Civil War would never have broken out if our governors had only attended to the First Amendment as much as they had attended to the rights of Southern states. Throughout the 19th century, speech about slavery is routinely deemed by American legislators in Congress and in the north, as well as the south, as beyond the pale. That this is too dangerous to be allowed doesn't fall within the remit of free speech. And so in the Southern states, you may not. You can be prosecuted and fined and executed for attacking slavery, even as a white person. Black people, of course, have no right to talk about anything. But even in the north, mobs routinely attack and destroy abolitionist meetings. And they do so secure in the knowledge that public opinion also is full of people saying, this is Too dangerous. This can't be allowed. So the definition of free political speech, again, as we discussed earlier, is deeply racialized. The question of harm. I mean, the basic question is, what is harmful? Everyone agrees that you should not allow speech about things that are harmful. But the definition of what is harmful changes, obviously, wildly, over time. My beef with modern absolutist presumptions about free speech is that they lose sight of harm, or at best, all they come up with is this nonsense platitude, which is that bad speech, of course, does cause harm, but the only remedy is more speech. I don't think that's a sufficiently convincing and historically grounded way of approaching the real problems.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (58:48)

The other really interesting import from Cato's letters is that distinction between public and private spheres, because the First Amendment only speaks to Congress, it's only dealing with the public sphere, isn't it?

Professor Farah Dababala (59:02)

It's an extraordinary fact about American free speech doctrine because it emerges out of this curious, clumsy formulation. America, on the one hand, has, you might say, the strongest free speech protections of any nation. That's a proud inheritance of modern First Amendment doctrine, but on the other hand, the weakest, because these rights only apply vis a vis the government. Any private employer, any person not part of the government, however it's defined, may sanction and sack people and ruin their lives for the same kinds of speech. So taking the knee when the Pledge of Allegiance is spoken is a right that's guaranteed to all Americans vis a vis the government. You can't be sacked as a public officer for doing that, but if you do it as an American football player, you have no rights at all anyway. It's a trivial example, but there are many more serious ones where people's political speech is not protected at all vis a vis private power. And of course, most of life and most of expression does consist in us not engaging with the government, but with each other in other spheres.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (60:16)

You make a very strong argument, as we come to an end, about free speech in this book. You've alluded to it already that today we often valorise. You write permissiveness of expression as the highest good, as if it were inherently more important than questions of truth, equity or harm. And at one point you say that the free speech of some is always established through the silencing of others. You made some extraordinary discoveries during the course of this book. I wondered if in those discoveries and in processing the origin story, you've changed your mind whilst writing it.

Professor Farah Dababala (60:51)

I have changed my mind and actually, one very important discovery that I wasn't expecting but has come to be central to the book is that it's too simple for us. And one reason we get into trouble talking about free speech and arguing about it is that we just don't see beyond this. It's too simple to think about this as a problem that involves two actors, as it were. On the one hand the individual, on the other hand, the government. If you look at the United Kingdom right now, it's a complete mess in terms of free speech and how that's defined and how that's enforced. And that's partly for the same reason. It's all about government clamping down on individuals saying things. As early as the 18th and early 19th centuries, people who looked at this problem could see that there was a third thing that was very important, and that is the power of the media, especially the mass media, in shaping public opinion, in amplifying certain voices, in not allowing other voices to be heard as clearly and as loudly. And out of that came a really important series of critiques and rethinkings of free speech, both by socialists and communists who are attacking the mass media as essentially corrupt tools of capitalism with some justice. And that rich voices dominate the public sphere and owners of newspapers can tell the public what to think. That's still a powerful insight, but also from conservative thinkers who started to think, well, how can we improve on this? And out of this comes a really rich tradition of rethinking the First Amendment in America, rethinking free speech as also involving, on the one hand, the rights of the public to free expression. Sorry, the rights of the public to truthful information, the rights of the public to be informed properly so that they can make up their own mind and not to be lied to or only given partial truths by the mass media. And on the other hand, the responsibilities of the mass media to inform the public and not mislead the public them. Because everyone could see that the incentives of the mass media are not necessarily primarily to spread truth and advance public understanding. The incentives of the mass media are to make money and to increase the power of their owners and shareholders. So out of this come the insights that lead to public broadcasting, that lead to regulation at arm's length from government control of all the mass media that emerged in the 20th century. Cinemas, radio, newspapers, also to some degree in some countries, but especially television and film and things like that. One of the scary things about our current moment is that for historical reasons that I explain, we are now living in a moment where we are actually our public discourse is dominated by a completely new mass medium, the Internet. Online speech is much more powerful than any of those earlier ones, and yet it's not regulated in anything like the same way, especially in the United States. It's never been thought of as a form of publishing, but that's exactly what it is. And algorithms on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, or whether they are censoring, they are amplifying certain voices and dismissing others or reducing their reach and so on. So this is a really powerful, important issue in our society. It's part of what we're struggling with as societies across the world, and it needs more attention. When we think about free speech, we need to think about the responsibilities of the mass media, how to regulate them in ways that do justice to their immense power and their immense greed. Let's be clear about it. That's the thing that I discovered that made me think harder and that I hope people will take away from the book as well.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (64:30)

And I think in the end, we sort of come full circle to thinking about the seriousness of speech. I mean, the pre modern were right in a way that actually speech is in action and harm done to the soul, to the bones, is greater than that done by sticks to the flesh, whatever my mother said when I was growing up. So I think that actually just recognizing the power of words is part of the answer. Perhaps.

Professor Farah Dababala (65:02)

I think so. But again, we need to be clear about what that means. Most of the time, speech is a trivial action. It's a fleeting action. It's not a very dangerous action. It's a harmless action. But we need at the same time to recognize that sometimes certain types of speech can cause harm, maybe not just in the individual action, but in its repetition, in its amplification, in its spread. And we need to focus more on defining as a society what those harms are rather than being sidetracked and how we want to deal with them. Term rather than being sidetracked into shouting about free speech. The fewer laws we have about speech, the better. Laws can always be weaponized. That's part of the problem of the enforcement of them in the United Kingdom right now. But nonetheless, we can't do away with the regulation of harm altogether. That would be a crazy route to take.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (65:51)

Professor Dabavala, thank you for giving us so much to think about today. This has been deeply interesting and I'm so grateful for your time. And of course, obviously people who are interested can pick up the history of free speech and learn much more than we've been able to cram into this very full podcast. Thank you so much.

Professor Farah Dababala (66:08)

It's a great pleasure. Thank you. Susie.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (66:11)

Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddow, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetudorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.

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Professor Farah Dababala (67:17)

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