Dangerous Ideas by Eric Berkowitz — how speech has been suppressed through history

Louis XV’s Council of State decreed death for anyone who stirred up emotions. And why not? After all, Louis the Beloved, France’s second longest-serving monarch, was only doing what past rulers had done — controlling what people wrote, said and heard.

The first officially recorded instance of state censorship is said to be in Rome in the second century BC, when texts citing Pythagorean philosophy were denounced as subversive. A bonfire was prepared by victimarii, slaughterers whose day job was to perform animal sacrifices.

In his captivating sprint through two millennia of censorship, Eric Berkowitz chronicles some of the more bizarre and egregious episodes, while explaining that the human instinct to suppress speech has rarely waned. Indeed, the issue is possibly as fraught now as it has ever been. Habits have not changed; only the technology has. In so doing it has provided unbridled opportunities for the abuse of speech, the whipping up of hatreds and the manipulation of information.

Throughout history, all forms of speech deemed to undermine the sanctity of kings could lead to execution in a variety of excruciating forms. Any discussion of military weakness was beyond the pale, any form of mockery too. To cast doubt on Elizabeth I’s ability to conceive was to incur the wrath of the authorities; so too was any questioning of the inalienable right to own slaves in 19th-century America. Sometimes it was just a matter of timing. The strangulation and then burning of William Tyndale in 1536 for translating the New Testament into English came just a few years before Henry VIII broke with Rome.

The powerful believed that information, put in the wrong hands, would inexorably lead to social strife. Censors were important implementers of state power, but their knowledge of the issues involved and of their own societies sometimes fell short. Das Kapital evaded the Russian censor because Marx’s economic analysis was considered too difficult for the proletariat to understand. The lower orders were also seen as licentious by nature. Sexual material was permitted for educated men, not for the fairer sex. “Exposing them to such content would rouse in them a slumbering dragon of lust, to the destruction of family, home and all that is well and good in society,” writes Berkowitz.

Yet censorship invariably leads to attempts at circumvention. Once bans had been imposed on libellés, scurrilous and often sexually charged satire that was all the rage in France, they were secretly published in the Netherlands and slipped back over the border.

The First Amendment provides some grandly crafted words but few tools with which to address the issue of free speech

Free speech is often seen as a means to an end. In the past few centuries, writes Berkowitz, “we see increasingly muscular pushes to open unrestrained debate, often led by groups seeking power, only to see those same parties often slamming the door shut once their political objectives were realized”. Revolutionaries and reactionaries are, he suggests, equally culpable.

The McCarthyism of 1950s America marked perhaps the last throes of a rightwing establishment seeking to hold back the tide. Now, the author contends, “many on the Left have come to look to governments to impose censorship — against pornography and sexism, against racist, hate, and offensive speech, against fake news, and against the excesses of the wealthy and of industry”.

Berkowitz reminds readers that America’s First Amendment provides some grandly crafted words but few tools with which to address the issue. The “clear and present danger” test, as defined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919, became the template for American jurisprudence. Shouting “fire” in a crowded room was regarded as the one, and sometimes only, reason to prosecute wrongful speech. Other countries have invariably enacted much wider restrictions. In recent decades that has stumbled against the right to individual dignity as applied more forcefully by European courts. Dangerous Ideas provides ample examples of cultural particularities. Yet the author seldom ranges much beyond Europe and America.

Which brings us to the present era of Donald Trump’s lying, Russia’s hacking and China’s industrial-scale assault on dissent.

Summer books 2021

From politics, economics and history to art, food and, of course, fiction — FT writers and critics choose their favourite reads of the year so far

The final chapter, on the seismic contemporary challenge, provides a useful examination of the dilemmas but few solutions. A decade ago, when I ran the freedom of expression organisation Index on Censorship, I worried about what I saw as the tendency of liberals to advocate press curbs, to elevate the taking of offence into a quasi universal human right. Free speech, I insisted, was not the same as good speech.

These debates have become ever more acrimonious and difficult to navigate. How can internet giants be better regulated? Where is the line to be drawn on the contested territory of free speech and offence? Berkowitz wonders whatever happened to “the readiness to tolerate obnoxious opinions”. Or to put it more immediately: was it right to ban Trump from social media? And if so, was that because he is a danger, a liar or a bigot? These are the same questions that kings and courtiers have always grappled with.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship on the West, from the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz, The Westbourne Press £20, 384 pages

John Kampfner is author of ‘Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country’ (Atlantic)

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café