At times, twenty-first-century societies seem to be drowning in speech: more books every year; an apparently infinite number of online and print journals, magazines, and newspapers; and a proliferation of podcasts, social media platforms, and websites. In other words, a virtual cacophony aimed at a seemingly unlimited audience of readers, listeners, likers, sharers, and re-Tweeters. Contemporary debates often degenerate into dichotomies between “free speech” and “hate speech,” or cavalier paeans to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (the former tend to the vapid; the latter could benefit from reading Christopher Barker's illuminating chapter in the volume under review). It is tempting—and, it turns out upon exploring this wonderful collection of essays, deeply rewarding—to turn from current concerns and revisit some controversies that predate our own.
Of course, freedom of speech has never existed in isolation; it has always formed part of a broad cluster of commitments, tied to liberties of press, petitioning, and assembly as well as the rights of representative institutions, the integrity of persons, and—arguably most central to the period under consideration here—liberty of conscience. (A direct line links Milton's anti-licensing arguments in Areopagitica to his trenchant observation that “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large” [“On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” 1646, l.20].) The drafters of the American Bill of Rights, after all, bundled a prohibition on religious establishment and a guarantee of religious exercise alongside freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and petitioning into one (not coincidentally, the first) constitutional amendment.
There are large-scale and noteworthy developments in freedom of speech during these years: the English Reformation and Civil Wars, the lapse of one Licensing Act (1695) and passage of a new one (1737), the passage of one Blasphemy Act (1697) and failure of another (1721), the aforementioned First Amendment. But the essays in Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850, edited by Robert Ingram, Jason Peacey, and Alex Barber, illustrate the importance of less momentous, and less public, maneuvering. Ingram, Peacey, and Barber open by surveying the scholarship on early modern freedom of speech, pointing out that during this period “addressing freedom of speech meant dealing simultaneously with issues of liberty, pluralism, politics and restraint” (1). The chapters vary widely in scope: considerations of individual thinkers (Joanne Paul on Thomas Elyot, David Womersley on Jonathan Swift, Greg Conti on Samuel Bailey), examinations of political debates (Ingram and Barber on the proposed 1721 Blasphemy Act, Max Skjönsberg on Hume's critique of the Walpole administration), and overviews of longer-term developments (Peter Lake on Elizabethan and early Stuart arguments, Ann Thompson on eighteenth-century British and French thinkers). The ubiquity of early modern censorship regimes and the tension between prepublication licensing and post-publication liability as strategies to restrict speech recur throughout.
Free speech as a moral and political value often appears as part of the broader republican tradition, constitutive of what Patrick Peel calls “a deep moral commitment to building a society in which human beings might live in full possession of their liberties” (203). Yet a general notion of free speech seems less salient than the contingent circumstances in which speech acts took place: how, when, where, aimed at whom, and in what form. Skjönsberg calls defending liberty of the press during the Walpole years “quintessentially an opposition activity” (179), while Peel identifies it with a “cultural struggle . . . waged between elite and middling groups” (193). Indeed, rarely were debates over free speech entirely about free speech at all. They reflected a host of other fears: popery, persecution, civil order, foreign threats, the moral degeneracy of the population. If there is a larger arc running through these various chapters, it may run something like this. As Lake observes, the passage of time saw an expansion from a “very restricted circle of persons” authorized to speak freely, in restricted spaces—the king's closet, the council table, Parliament—to a wide range of unruly publics and genres, with speech claims often justified by “allegedly pressing threats . . . legitimated by the rhetoric of conspiracy and emergency” (66, 68, 73). Institutionally speaking, English rhetoric frequently drew on the liberty that the monarch granted to Parliament during its sitting. By the 1640s, such a touchstone had evolved into a broader argument that, as David Como puts it, “Parliament-time [represented] a kind of commercial competition, a free-wheeling bazaar of ideas and proposals” (110). (We might also consider such a metaphor in light of Bailey's notion of a marketplace of ideas two hundred years later.)
The volume's authors compellingly raise a series of related questions. Who got free speech? In a word, elites; few thinkers endorsed extending protection to “vulgar” enthusiasts. Jonathan Swift's ambivalent attitude toward free speech, his own career as a satirist notwithstanding, revealed his fears of speech's anarchic tendencies and the possibility for it to degenerate into “self-regarding garrulousness” (128). Where do audiences fit in? Counselors attempting to speak frankly to monarchs faced a particular set of concerns (“the paradox of counsel”); other, rather different, challenges confronted speakers facing hostile audiences. Karl Gunther explores the ways that English Puritans attempted to balance the Great Commission with the implacable resistance they faced from many of the “ungodly.” And, of course, Mill's reluctance to endorse press freedom in India says a great deal about his low estimation of that public's competence for reasoned deliberation. What is the point of free speech? Few thinkers construed freedom of speech as an end in itself. More often, it appeared as a means to a larger end: “individuality,” for Mill, “as one of the elements of well-being” (On Liberty, chapter 3); or Truth, which, as Ann Thomson explains, often justified distinctions between “reasoned works” and “lampoons and libels” (147). Then again, such an emphasis on Truth assumed an “underlying belief in the reasonable nature of humans, who will naturally accept the truth when it is expressed” (145), beliefs shot through with classist and, in Mill's case, racist assumptions about human capability and the quality of public discussion.
As with any collection that addresses such a wide range of thinkers and periods, one could quibble at points along the way. Does the 350 years canvassed here—stretching from Henry VII to Victoria, from Reformation to Industrial Revolution—really constitute “a coherent period” (2)? One can welcome the revisitation of Mill on India, yet Barker's critique of Mill comes across as rather gently worded, elliptically suggesting that “the liberty principle is not context-independent” (250) and calling Mill's support for free speech “absolute-ish” (240). Given the remarkable parallels between Mill and Bailey sketched by Conti, one wonders why we ought to invest the effort to release Mill's theory “from its straitened conception of (British Indian) publics” (236), when we could turn instead to Bailey's Formation and Publication of Opinions. But these are quibbles. Each of these authors raises powerful claims about the historical origins of one of the central elements of modern political thought and practice. Ingram, Peacey, and Barber have done us all a service by bringing them together.
