What is free speech? : the history of a dangerous idea /
Fara Dabhoiwala.
- First Harvard University Press edition
- vii, 472 pages ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
The Power of Speech -- Tolerating Words -- Inventing Free Speech -- The Shapes of Freedom -- Enlightened Experiments -- The Accidental Exceptionalism of the First Amendment -- Legitimate and Illegitimate Expressions -- Imperial Entanglements -- Colonial and Postcolonial Unfreedoms -- The Marketplace of Ideas -- Afterword: From the Past to the Future.
"Every premodern society, from Sumeria to China to seventeenth–century Europe, knew that bad words could destroy lives, undermine social order, and create political unrest. Given the obvious dangers of outspokenness, regulating speech and print was universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way begin to break down. In a brief span of time, the freedom to use words as one pleased was reimagined as an ideal to be held and defended in common. Fara Dabhoiwala explores the surprising paths free speech has taken across the globe since its invention three hundred years ago. Though free speech has become a central democratic principle, its origins and evolution have less to do with the high-minded pursuit of liberty and truth than with the self-interest of the wealthy, the greedy, and the powerful. Free speech, as we know it, is a product of the pursuit of profit, of technological disruption, of racial and imperial hypocrisy, and of the contradictions involved in maintaining openness while suppressing falsehood. For centuries, its shape has everywhere been influenced by international, not just national, events; nowhere has it ever been equally available to women, the colonized, or those stigmatized as racially inferior. Rejecting platitudes about the First Amendment and its international equivalents, and leaving no ideological position undisturbed, What Is Free Speech? is the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood."-- Provided by publisher
9780674987319 (hardcover) 0674987314 (hardcover)
2024059243
Freedom of speech--History Libertad de expresión Freedom of speech--History--English-speaking countries Libertad de expresión --Historia --Países de habla inglesa