This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
As disputes over free speech in the internet age rage, a pithy genealogy of the subject with a strong argument is both timely and welcome. Princeton historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea certainly fits the bill.
His basic thesis, that there is a long tradition of free speech within well understood ethical and legal limits, and that free speech absolutism is a relatively recent norm born from American libertarianism, has much to recommend it and is based on sound scholarship. Likewise, his warning that private power and money is as much a threat to free speech as government censorship is surely right, as is his argument that free speech is not an end in itself, but should serve the common good.
So much for the positives. But in nearly every other respect this book embodies the failure and blindness of the English-speaking academy to deal with political reality and its own failures. It is also an extraordinarily partial work, sometimes breathtaking in its unintentional self-parody. Consider Dabhoiwala’s description of colonial-era laws in India against religious insult:
It grants special, untouchable status to religious myths and beliefs … it is also wide open to abuse: it incentivizes the display of wounded emotions, can be easily deployed against political and religious opponents and tends to aggravate rather than pacify sectarian antagonisms.
But on the very same page, Fara enthuses about contemporary hate speech laws:
After all, it’s been obvious throughout history that the unchecked spread of hateful speech about racial, ethnic, religious or other groups can cause serious harm … Laws against hateful speech therefore uphold the principle of equal status
Nor is this protection to be equally applied: “which particular identities require such legal protection is likewise a political judgment that differs by culture — though nowadays it invariably includes minority racial and ethnic identities”. Colonial hate speech laws were, you see, rooted in a terrible racial condescension, whilst modern-day hate speech laws are acts of benign racial paternalism.
Later on, in a similarly shameless vein, we are assured that “cancel culture” is simply “a result of the growing power and voice of previously marginalized groups”. However, right-wing demands for freedom and on the basis of, say, conservative religious identity, are dismissed as “making ‘religious liberty’ an excuse for discriminatory speech and action and repressing the discussion of racism, sexism, gender identity, sexual orientation and other unwelcome subjects”.
The casual, utterly unself-aware partisanship of the writing is all the stranger for the continual and correct observation that freedom of speech arguments are often a thin cypher for cynical political power plays. It’s almost frighteningly disconcerting to encounter an obviously intelligent historian of ideas who is either unable or, one suspects, unwilling to engage in even the most basic self-criticism about his class, ideology and profession.
The problem is that, having posed the question of what free speech is actually for, Dabhoiwala refuses to answer it, instead describing it as a case-by-case, utterly contextual, ceaselessly complex balancing act. There is always truth to complexifying narratives, but they should be treated with the same scepticism as simplifying ones: what is being concealed, what is being pushed?
Here there is a clear answer, and it’s depressingly predictable. Of course the All Souls graduate and Princeton professor thinks that the contemporary academy is the peerless model for civil society and governance: “Scholarship … remains the best example we have of a speech model that has as its overriding purpose the advancement of truth about hard questions — and that has been proven to work.”
There is nothing wrong with advocating for your profession and class, but nowhere in What is Free Speech? are readers given any hint that academics (unlike journalists, who get a kicking from first page to last) are anything other than guardians of truth and rigour. We get exhaustive excursions into India and 18th- and 19th-century political controversies, but universities are curiously absent.
The radical campus politics that began in the 60s and 70s and saw often disruptive, violent and abusive forms of speech wielded against academics with the “wrong” politics are never touched upon or acknowledged. The author’s own politicised speech norms, in which “cancel culture” and “religious liberty” are put in scare quotes and “Black” is invariably capitalised, are obvious but never reflected upon.
All these omissions are unfortunate because they entirely undermine the author’s credibility and his case for the historic, traditional limits of free speech. Instead Dabhoiwala has only confirmed the worst assumptions that critics of liberal academia already have — that they are arrogant, worshipful of experts and contemptuous of the incorrigibly ignorant masses.
