The poet, literary philosopher, critic and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked that Samuel Johnson, that great father of English letters, often selected the right passages in Shakespeare for closer analysis — only to make the wrong observations.
I fear Princeton historian Fara Dabhoiwala gave me the same vibes in his recent essay on free speech, which online ran with the headline “The real history of free speech — from supreme ideal to poisonous politics” (The Weekend Essay, Life & Arts, March 15).
He identifies many of the essential questions surrounding free speech today, yet he takes the wrong turn. Dabhoiwala notes that in 1695, the English Parliament failed to renew the law requiring the pre-licensing of books, a significant moment in the history of free expression. Yet, curiously, he does not mention Areopagitica, John Milton’s great plea to parliament in 1644 for “the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing”.
Dabhoiwala’s suggestion that free speech is mutable, shaped by shifting historical conditions, is the wrong observation. It is not that freedom of speech is an evolving construct, but rather a constant moral duty — one that lies within each individual.
Milton does not argue that free speech is timeless; rather, he implies it as an active obligation placed upon all, to seek after truth. Then, it is not simply a right conferred by cultures or governments, but a charge given to all people: to listen, to engage, to weigh competing arguments, and to take responsibility for their own judgments.
This is not merely a principle of free speech — it is the foundation of democracy itself. And if this duty is neglected? Then, one must ask, can democracy itself endure?
To grasp the origins of free speech in western civilisation, go to Athens, to the great stones of the Pnyx, where the earliest democratic assemblies convened. Stand upon the Vima, the speaker’s platform, and you look out towards the Parthenon and to rocks of the Areopagus — the very place from which Milton’s Areopagitica takes its name.
Free speech was not an abstract right to be theorised; it was a duty to be exercised.
Simon Gibson
Founder, World Speech Day Cirencester, Gloucestershire, UK
