What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea

“A brilliant history of a weaponized mantra.” —The Guardian

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 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 u...