What Is Free Speech?

The reinvention of an idea we now take for granted. What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea by leading intellectual historian Fara Dabhoiwala traces how a concept once viewed as hazardous and unnatural was transformed into an unalloyed good — with enormous consequences for the world we live in now.

The book moves from Sumeria and China to seventeenth-century Europe, showing how every premodern society understood that words could destroy lives and unsettle social order — and treated speech regulation as a proper function of government. Only in the early 1700s did that old order break down, as the freedom to speak as one pleased was reimagined as a defining ideal. Called "a brilliant history of a weaponized mantra" by The Guardian.

Where the modern argument began.