A Tablet¿Best Book of the Year
A Guardian¿Best History and Politics Book

A leading intellectual historian shows how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented as an unalloyed good, with enormous consequences for our society today.

Every premodern civilization, from Sumeria to seventeenth-century Europe, knew that bad words could destroy lives and social orders. Regulating speech and print was thus universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way break down. In a brief span of time, the freedom to use words as one pleased was reimagined as a political ideal.

Fara Dabhoiwala explores the surprising paths free speech has taken across the globe since its invention three hundred years ago. Today free speech is a central democratic principle, but its origins and evolution have less to do with high-minded citizenship 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 imperial hypocrisy, and of the contradictions involved in maintaining openness while suppressing falsehood. Nowhere has free speech been equally available to women, the colonized, or those deemed racially inferior.

Leaving no ideological position undisturbed,¿What Is Free Speech?¿is the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood.