Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God or of rulers anointed by God. Heterodox views were suppressed through law, force or social pressure.

Fara Dabhoiwala sets out to do two things in this book. The first is to trace the history of freedom of expression as an intellectual concept and a political programme. The second is to set out his views on its limitations and contradictions. Dabhoiwala is not an opponent of freedom of expression, but he does not give it three cheers. At best it gets a single, rather faint-hearted one.

As history, What is Free Speech? is disappointing. As a practical political programme, freedom of speech originated in 18th-century Britain and America, but as an idea it is much older. It is therefore rather surprising to find Dabhoiwala suggesting that free speech as a way of thinking about politics and public debate was ‘invented’ by two comparatively obscure English journalists in 1721. This seems a little unfair to Erasmus, Milton, Bayle, Spinoza, Locke and other profound thinkers who wrote in defence of the idea before anyone had heard of Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard or their Cato’s Letters column in the London Journal. Dabhoiwala’s treatment of the subsequent history is more orthodox but it is undermined by a highly selective deployment of the evidence, guided by the author’s personal reservations about the whole concept of freedom of expression.

Most readers will find these reservations more thought-provoking than the history. They only gradually emerge from his text, but they can fairly be summarised in three main points. First, Dabhoiwala argues, the concept of free speech is incoherent because it is almost invariably subject to exceptions and qualifications that reflect the prejudices of the age. He quotes with apparent approval the view of another author that this reduces the concept to a ‘meaningless catchphrase’. His second reservation is based on an idea first popularised by the German-American Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in a famous essay entitled ‘Repressive Tolerance’. Free speech, according to Marcuse, is generally a tool of the rich and powerful, who have better access to public platforms. Thirdly, Dabhoiwala argues that free speech enables people to engage in what he calls ‘group libel’, otherwise known as ‘hate speech’ – the denigration of ethnic and other minorities. These things being against the public interest, he suggests that we should be prepared to regulate speech for the same reasons we regulate other useful but potentially dangerous facilities, such as financial services.

The author’s choice of illustrations is informed mainly by his anger about the slave trade and the British Empire. He observes that the British led the way in allowing freedom of political expression at home but in their empire overseas hypocritically denied it to slaves and indigenous peoples. Thus Dabhoiwala damns John Stuart Mill as an employee of the East India Company and a defender of legal restrictions on free expression in India rather than recognising him as the apostle of liberalism that he plainly was.

The answer to the question posed by his title seems obvious enough. Free speech means the absence of external constraints on statements of fact or opinion, however communicated. The debate about it is essentially concerned with the proper limits of coercion. Freedom of expression undermines authority, which is why it has no place in societies wholly based on the exercise of coercive power. The logic of censorship is the same whether those who are silenced are slaves, indigenous colonial subjects or the inhabitants of Russia and China today.

There are two main reasons why the rest of us instinctively believe in freedom of expression. One is that constraints on the communication of fact or opinion invade our autonomy as moral agents and thinking creatures. When the constraints are imposed by governments, as they usually have been, they imply a relationship between the individual and the state that is morally repellent. They reduce us to the status of mere instruments of other people’s power. The second is that no one person or group, however respectable or powerful, has exclusive access to truth or wisdom. This is not just because the capacity of the human mind is limited. It is also because truth and wisdom are dynamic concepts, informed by a stock of experience that is constantly increasing. 

Once upon a time, people believed that the sun went round the world, because that view had the authority of the Old Testament. Once upon a time, people believed in the legitimacy of slavery, the natural inferiority of women and the persecution of homosexuals. These notions were supported by the social consensus of the age but died out in the face of rational discourse. On the whole, minorities have been the main beneficiaries of this process. Of course, as Dabhoiwala points out, what Mill called the ‘collision of adverse opinions’ is not guaranteed to produce truth or the wisest possible outcomes. But in the long term it is more likely to do so than any system of intellectual control.

Even in societies based on political and intellectual pluralism, freedom of expression is almost always qualified, but the qualifications are not necessarily incoherent. The common law generally distinguishes between words and actions. Words are not deemed criminal unless they are inflammatory and calculated to provoke a breach of the peace. This was the basis on which those whose social media posts encouraged people to riot outside immigration hostels in 2024 were sent to jail.

Legal restrictions on what people can say or write are coercive. In a liberal society, they can be justified only if they are necessary in order to prevent coercion of another kind – that which is inherent in violent disorder. Modern statutes, at any rate in Britain, have generally adhered to this principle. Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalises certain hate speech, contains a broad exemption for discussion, criticism and expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse, even if some police forces have yet to notice the fact. Dabhoiwala rejects the distinction between words and actions. Yet the difference is obvious and rational. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive, except in cases where they are calculated to provoke violence.

In a world of free expression, some of what people say will be wrong, hurtful or even objectively harmful. We can all point to public statements that are untrue, mischievous or absurd, sometimes manifestly so. But manifestness is not a very useful criterion. Nearly every received opinion that rational examination has discredited was once regarded as manifestly true by those who held it. The principle that we would have to accept in order to justify censoring such statements is more damaging than the statements themselves. We cannot have truth and wisdom without accommodating error and folly because the boundary between the two is usually a matter on which people may legitimately differ. In the end, we have to accept the implications of human inquisitiveness, creativity and imagination. The alternative is to entrust significant parts of our intellectual world to public authorities whose capacity for objectivity, truthfulness and wisdom is no greater than our own.