What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Dabhoiwala, Fara
What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Dabhoiwala, Fara

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,...
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SKU: 9780674987319
Product Type: Books
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Author: Fara Dabhoiwala
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $45.61
What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Dabhoiwala, Fara

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

$45.61
What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Dabhoiwala, Fara

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

$45.61
Author: Fara Dabhoiwala
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description

"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 universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way begin to break down. In a brief span of time, the freedom to use words as one pleased was reimagined as an ideal to be held and defended in common.

Fara Dabhoiwala explores the surprising paths free speech has taken across the globe since its invention three hundred years ago. Though free speech has become a central democratic principle, its origins and evolution have less to do with the high-minded pursuit of liberty and truth than with the self-interest of the wealthy, the greedy, and the powerful. Free speech, as we know it, is a product of the pursuit of profit, of technological disruption, of racial and imperial hypocrisy, and of the contradictions involved in maintaining openness while suppressing falsehood. For centuries, its shape has everywhere been influenced by international, not just national, events; nowhere has it ever been equally available to women, the colonized, or those stigmatized as racially inferior.

Rejecting platitudes about the First Amendment and its international equivalents, and leaving no ideological position undisturbed, What Is Free Speech? is the unsettling history of an ideal as cherished as it is misunderstood.

Author: Fara Dabhoiwala
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: 08/05/2025
Pages: 480
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 9.41h x 6.56w x 1.47d
ISBN: 9780674987319


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2025
Library Journal 06/20/2025 pg. 1

About the Author
Dabhoiwala, Fara: - Fara Dabhoiwala is Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. Formerly on faculty at the University of Oxford, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, All Souls College, and Exeter College.
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