Freedom of speech, 1500–1850

Robert Ingram, Jason Peacey, Alex W. Barber, Robert G. Ingram, Robert Ingram, Jason Peacey, Alex W. Barber

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526167064
  9781526147103
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526147097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This collection brings together historians, political theorists and literary scholars to provide historical perspectives on the modern debate over freedom of speech, particularly the question of whether limitations might be necessary given religious pluralism and concerns about hate speech. It integrates religion into the history of free speech and rethinks what is sometimes regarded as a coherent tradition of more or less absolutist justifications for free expression. Contributors examine the aims and effectiveness of government policies, the sometimes contingent ways in which freedom of speech became a reality and a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts in which contemporaries outlined their ideas and ideals. Overall, the book argues that while the period from 1500 to 1850 witnessed considerable change in terms of both ideas and practices, these were more or less distinct from those that characterise modern debates.

Chapter 1

Freedom of speech in England and the anglophone world, 1500–1850

Jason Peacey, Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber

Daniel Defoe was of two minds about freedom of speech. On the one hand, he reckoned that many had misused their liberty to express their views in print. It would, he lamented, ‘be endless to examine the Liberty taken by the Men of Wit in the World, the loose they give themselves in Print, at Religion, at Government, at Scandal; the prodigious looseness of the Pen, in broaching new Opinions in Religion, as well as Politics, are real Scandals to the Nation, and well deserve a Regulation’.¹ The ideological cell-division catalysed by the Reformation had, by Defoe’s day, made pluralism a fact of English life. And ideological battles first played out in print.² Yet Defoe also reckoned that government licensing of publications was itself inimical to liberty: ‘I cannot see how the supervising, and passing all the Works of the Learned part of the World by one or a few men, and giving them an absolute Negative on the Press, can possibly be reconcil’d to the liberty of the English Nation’.³ Print licensing was ‘a Branch of Arbitrary Power in the Government’.⁴ Moreover, Defoe insisted, that the English could express their views freely and openly had meant that the ‘English Nation had always carried a figure equal to their Neighbours, as to all sorts of Learning, and in some very much superior’.⁵ Freedom of speech and the allied freedom of the press, then, both encouraged learning amongst the English and potentially destabilised English society and politics. And though he disapproved of press regulation, Defoe’s Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) none the less prioritised peace over liberty, and offered possible legal solutions that might ensure effective restraints on the promulgation of ideas which threatened the civil peace.⁶

Daniel Defoe, like most English men and women from the Reformation onwards, recognised that addressing freedom of speech meant dealing simultaneously with issues of liberty, pluralism, politics and restraint. This book about the early history of freedom of speech also highlights the connections between liberty, pluralism, politics and restraint. It covers the period from the early sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and treats that stretch of time as a coherent period, one which was not unvariegated but one in which there nonetheless existed a set of coherent practical and theoretical problems which animated the discussion and practice of free speech.

Freedom of speech is a topic that has long been an unapologetically Western liberal ideal. Those living in the English-speaking world are especially prone to be adherents of ‘free speech fundamentalism’.⁷ A number of reasons account for the Western liberal valorisation of freedom of speech. Firstly, the right to speak freely flows naturally from the anthropology of liberalism itself. The individual, as Larry Siedentop has argued, is ‘the organizing social role in the West’; and civil society ‘emerged, with its characteristic distinction between public and private spheres and its emphasis on the role of conscience and choice’ from the primacy of the individual in the West.⁸ Liberalism, in turn, is the Western ideology which most wholly prioritises the individual, conceiving of the individual as an autonomous self which reaches its fullest realisation through its ability to make unfettered choices.⁹ It hardly surprises that Western liberals explicitly link the ability to speak freely with the full realisation of the individual self. Timothy Garton Ash recently defended free speech by saying that ‘we need freedom of expression to realise our full individual humanity’, and ‘[i]f we are prevented from exercising it freely, we cannot fully be ourselves’.¹⁰ Other more obvious reasons have also recommended free speech as a Western virtue. Most notably, modern repressive regimes have been anti-liberal ones which have always stifled freedom of speech, even as they have often paid lip service to protecting free speech and the free press.¹¹ Nowhere was this more evident than in twentieth-century Communist regimes, so that, with Communism’s fall in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Soviet bloc, Western liberals could look with satisfaction at the apparent victory of their own cultural and political values.¹² Indeed, many interpreted Communism’s collapse as a sign of the latent desire amongst all people for the democratic values championed by free Western societies.

Freedom of expression also lay at the heart of post-Second World War political projects. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (1948) – inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proclamation of the ‘four freedoms’ – declared there to be a number of fundamental human rights, including freedom from slavery, freedom of movement within borders and freedom of conscience. Yet Article 19 – ‘everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference … everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression’ – undergirded the basic concepts of dignity, liberty, equality and brotherhood.¹³ The UDHR reckoned that freedom of speech would buttress future democratic states, all of which struggled to recover from their catastrophic recent – and unfree – pasts. For the UDHR’s architects assumed that the document would be adopted by Western countries precisely because they inhabited a civilisation with long-held traditions of personal liberties and freedom.¹⁴ That the countries which refused to adopt the UDHR – the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa – were totalitarian, theocratic or apartheid states only deepened the Western, liberal conviction that freedom of expression posed an existential threat to illiberal regimes.

However, the view that freedom of speech was both the prerequisite for and the bulwark of a stable liberal state has recently come under severe pressure on two broad fronts, one concerning religious expression – especially regarding Islam – and the other concerning hate speech. The response to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), which questioned the status of the Prophet Muhammad, exposed a crack in the liberal edifice of free speech fundamentalism.¹⁵ In response to Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning Rushdie and his publishers to death for having committed blasphemy against Islam, many reacted angrily to attempts to banish Rushdie’s book from the public sphere but reserved most ire for, in their view, tepid defenders of free speech.

The Satanic Verses affair traded on and destabilised the legacy of a commonplace version of the Enlightenment. Modernity – read most reductively as secular liberalism – is understood by many as a unitary version of public life in which all matters can be discussed freely and in which religion is banished from the public sphere.¹⁶ The Rushdie affair called into question the supposedly inherent connection between free speech, secularism and political stability. Many liberal commentators reckoned that mobs demanding that Rushdie’s book should be withdrawn directly challenged a home-grown English version of liberal progress. England, so it was claimed, was ‘the home of freedom’ and it was a full-frontal assault upon that memory to witness ‘the burning of books and an openly homicidal witch-hunt’.¹⁷ And yet, those on both the left and right who defended Rushdie and the absolute freedom of speech had to confront uncomfortable truths. Geoffrey Robertson’s praise of the Home Office’s decision to discontinue any further blasphemy prosecutions, for instance, reminded many that blasphemy remained illegal in Britain late into the twentieth century.¹⁸

This was just the start of the problem. The Rushdie affair, the Jyllands-Posten publications of 2005, the Charlie Hebdo murders in 2015 and the 2018 verdict of the European Court of Human Rights – which deemed certain criticisms of Muhammad to be blasphemous – have led many to ask whether the liberal model of public debate (secular) might be inadequate in today’s hyperpluralistic world.¹⁹ This inadequacy comes through most clearly in the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling that it is blasphemous to accuse the Prophet of being a paedophile. On the one hand, the court affirmed that ‘freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions for its progress’. On the other hand, it contended that the exercise of freedom of expression ‘carries with it duties and responsibilities’, which include ‘the duty to avoid as far as possible an expression that is, in regard to objects of veneration, gratuitously offensive to others and profane’. The reason these duties and responsibilities exist is to preserve the public peace: ‘Where such expressions go beyond the limits of a critical denial of other people’s religious beliefs and are likely to incite religious intolerance … a State may legitimately consider them to be incompatible with respect for the freedom of thought, conscience and religion and take proportionate restrictive measures’.²⁰

The European Court of Human Rights was not the first in the postwar era to insist that some things cannot be said publicly. Just as the Soviet Union had believed that the West used the UDHR deliberately to sanctify certain rights to make a partisan political point, so too did some Islamic countries and Muslim scholars object to what they believed was a system in which religious belief and human rights were made deliberately incompatible. The dispute between Islamic countries at the UN General Assembly about whether the UDHR should be adopted has never gone away. Instead, it has encouraged further debate and thinking about how the relationship between religion and public debate might best be constructed, culminating in the signing of the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights (1990) by the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation. Whilst the Cairo Declaration has largely been dismissed in the liberal West as being incompatible with human rights, its specific sections on freedom of opinion offer insights into the religious and ideological multivalence of freedom of speech in non-Western societies, beyond resorting to binaries of ‘repression’ and ‘freedom’.²¹ ‘Information’, the Cairo Declaration accepts, is ‘a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may violate sanctities and the dignity of prophets, undermine moral and ethical values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society, or weaken in faith’. This, in turn, means that ‘everyone shall have the right to advocate what is wrong and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Freedom of speech in England and the anglophone world, 1500–1850
• 2 Thomas Elyot on counsel, kairos and freeing speech in Tudor England
• 3 Pearls before swine: limiting godly speech in early seventeenth-century England
• 4 ‘Free speech’ in Elizabethan and early Stuart England
• 5 The origins of the concept of freedom of the press
• 6 Swift and free speech
• 7 Defending the truth: arguments for free speech and their limits in early eighteenth-century Britain and France
• 8 ‘The warr … against heaven by blasphemors and infidels’: prosecuting heresy in Enlightenment England
• 9 David Hume and ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ (1741) in its original contexts
• 10 The argument for the freedom of speech and press during the ratification of the US Constitution, 1787–88
• 11 Before – and beyond – On Liberty: Samuel Bailey and the nineteenth-century theory of free speech
• 12 Unfree, unequal, unempirical: press freedom, British India and Mill’s theory of the public
• Index