In 1582, the Dutchman Dirck Coornhert insisted that it was “tyrannical to…forbid good books in order to squelch the truth.” Denmark became the first state in the world to abolish any and all censorship in 1770. In the ninth century CE, the irreverent free-thinker Ibn al-Rawandī used the fertile intellectual climate of the Abbāsid Caliphate to question prophecy and holy books. The Athenian statesman Pericles extolled the democratic values of open debate and tolerance of social dissent in 431 BCE. In truth, the roots of free speech are ancient, deep, and sprawling. A revealing insight from this debate is that many Americans have a reductionist, parochial understanding of free speech, which they view as identical to the First Amendment-or, at least, as a particular Western Enlightenment value. This includes the U.S., where ideological partisanship and the resulting culture war frame much of the disagreement about the state of free speech. Free speech entropy.Īcross much of the world, the limits of free speech are hotly debated as digital developments have disrupted the traditional ecosystem of information and opinion. Listen to the audio version-read by Jacob himself-in the Next Big Idea App. Formerly, he spent six years as chief legal counsel for a free-market think tank, CEPOS.īelow, Jacob shares 5 key insights from his new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. He founded Justitia, a Copenhagen-based think tank specializing in human rights, and serves as its director.
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