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 THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND
CENSORSHIP

The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship offers a thorough

exploration of the debates surrounding this contentious topic, considering the importance
placed upon it in democratic societies and the reasons frequently proposed for limiting and
constraining it.
This volume addresses the various historical, philosophical, political and cultural parameters
of censorship and freedom of expression as well as current debates involving technology,
journalism and media regulation. Geographically, temporally and culturally diverse accounts
of censorship and freedom of expression are discussed through a broad range of perspectives
and case studies. This Companion covers core principles and concerns in addition to more
specialist and controversial debates, including those surrounding hate speech, holocaust
denial, pornography and so-called “cancel culture”. The collection pays particular attention
to the role of the media in both facilitating and suppressing freedom of expression.
Comprehensive, original and timely, The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and
Censorship is a go-to resource for scholars and advanced students of media, communication
and journalism studies.

John Steel is a Research Professor in Journalism in the School of Humanities and Journalism
at the University of Derby. He has published in the areas of journalism and media history,
journalism and its relationship to and with the public as well as journalism ethics and freedom
of the press.

Julian Petley is Honorary and Emeritus Professor of Journalism in the Department of Social
Sciences, Media and Communications at Brunel University London. He has a particular
interest in media regulation of all kinds, and has published widely in this area. He is a member
of the editorial boards of the British Journalism Review, Ethical Space and Porn Studies, and
editor-in-chief of The Journal of British Cinema and Television.
 THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO FREEDOM
OF EXPRESSION AND
CENSORSHIP

Edited by John Steel and Julian Petley

 Designed cover image: WhataWin / iStock via Getty Images
First published 2024
by Routledge
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© 2024 selection and editorial matter, John Steel and Julian Petley;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of John Steel and Julian Petley to be identifed as the authors
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has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Steel, John, 1966- editor. | Petley, Julian, editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to freedom of expression and censorship /
edited by John Steel and Julian Petley.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon [UK] ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Routledge media and cultural studies companions |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2023033613 (print) | LCCN 2023033614 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367205348 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032587110 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429262067 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Freedom of expression. | Censorship.
Classifcation: LCC K3253 .R68 2023 (print) | LCC K3253 (ebook) |
DDC 323.44--dc23/eng/20230928
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033613
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033614
ISBN: 9780367205348 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032587110 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429262067 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429262067
Typeset in Galliard
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
 CONTENTS

List of Contributors ix

Introduction: Censorship and freedom of expression in turbulent times 1

John Steel and Julian Petley

PART I
Concepts and histories 11

1 Freedom of expression as a pre-Enlightenment concept 13

Jordi Pujol

2 Freedom of expression, the Enlightenment and the liberal tradition 23

Geoff Kemp

3 Histories of in/tolerance 36
Russell Blackford

4 Literary infuence and legal precedent: Censorship in the Court of

Chancery, 1710–1823 46
Paul Whickman

5 The limits of Mill’s case for free discussion 56

Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij

6 Autonomy and freedom of expression 66

Eric Barendt

v
 Contents

7 Bentham and security against “misrule” 75

Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman

8 Freedom of expression in the twentieth century 85

Sue Curry Jansen

9 Philosophies of censorship and control 96

Eric Barendt

PART II
Global perspectives 107

10 Freedom of expression in Latin America in times of populism:

Between Western normative expectations and the complexities on
the ground 109
Ezequiel Korin and Jairo Lugo-Ocando

11 Protecting the pandemic press: Exploring press freedom in Africa

during the COVID-19 era 119
Bruce Mutsvairo and Kristin Skare Orgeret

12 Freedom of speech in the Arab region 128

Noha Mellor

13 Censorship and freedom of expression in China 138

“Chris” Fei Shen and Weiying Shi

14 Between speech freedom and national interests: The contested

boundaries of online freedom of expression in China 153
Yuan Zeng and Tongzhou Ran

15 Conservative sensibilities and freedom of expression in Japan: A brief

historical overview 163
Ryusaku Yamada

16 Freedom of expression in French laws and society 173

Imen Neffati

17 Faith and toleration in neoliberal times: Australia as a Case Study 183

Adam Possamai

vi
 Contents

PART III
Key controversies 193

18 The harm in hate speech and in Holocaust denial 195

Raphael Cohen-Almagor

19 The regulation of pornography, obscenity and indecency in UK law 208

Julian Petley

20 Political correctness: The Right’s Favourite Bugaboo 222

Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale

21 Free speech, “Cancel culture” and the “War on woke” 232

John Steel

22 Academic freedom and constrained expression 245

Thomas Docherty

23 Breaking news – media freedom in crisis 254

Simon Dawes

24 P2P speech regulation: Gossip, reputation and norm policing on social

media 262
Julie Seaman

25 Vitriol and voice: Battlegrounds to control employee expression on

social media in work 274
Claire Taylor

26 Hack attacks: How cyber intimidation and conspiracy theories drive

the spiral of “secrecy hacking” 285
Emma L. Briant

27 Violence, impunity and their impact on press freedom 296

Lada Trifonova Price

PART IV
Institutions, technologies and frameworks 307

28 Online censorship: The role of the intermediaries 309

Julian Petley

vii
 Contents

29 Freedom of expression and human rights: Interrogating the focus at

Strasbourg on political expression under Article 10 ECHR 324
Helen Fenwick

30 Balancing public and private interests in freedom of expression: A case

study of Whistleblower Protection in the case law of the European
Court of Human Rights 334
Dimitrios Kagiaros

31 Crying wolf: Invoking “national security” as grounds for censorship 346

Paul Lashmar

32 Marketing communications and media: Commercial Speech,

Censorship and Control 358
Jonathan Hardy

33 The regulation of the press: Some considerations on principles and power 368
Tom O’Malley

34 Freedom of the press in Britain: From radical to reactionary…to

reinvigoration? 379
Aaron Ackerley

35 “Should I stay (on X) or should I go?” Three causes of journalistic self-

censorship on X 389
Chrysi Dagoula

36 All the news that’s ft to report? News values and the “free press” 399
Tony Harcup

Index 409

viii
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Aaron Ackerley is a historian of modern Britain and the British empire. In particular, his
work focuses on questions of knowledge and power, such as intersections between elite and
popular political cultures and the media. He is a lecturer at NTNU in Trondheim. Aaron has
had research published on topics such as the coverage of radical politics in British interwar
quality newspapers, the history of free speech and the British press, and imperialist youth
movements.

Christopher Ahlström Vij is Reader and Chair in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, Research
Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), and Research
Associate at LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). Prior to
working at Birkbeck he was Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent, Canterbury (2012–
17), and a post doc at Rutgers University and the University of Copenhagen. He is the
co-editor of Epistemic Consequentialism (2018) and the author of Epistemic Paternalism: a
Defence (2013).

Eric Barendt, Emeritus Professor of Law, was the Goodman Professor of Media
Law at University College London, 1990-2010. He is the author of Freedom of
Speech (2005/2007), Academic Freedom and the Law (2010), and Anonymous Speech (2016),
as well as a number of articles on libel, and privacy law. He has been a Visiting Professor at
La Sapienza, Rome, Paris II, and the Universities of Melbourne, Auckland, and Hong Kong.
In 2012 he was a Special Legal Adviser to the Joint Committee of the House of Lords and
Commons on Privacy and Injunctions.

Russell Blackford is a Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle,

Australia, and Deputy Editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. He is the author of numer-
ous books, mainly in legal, moral, and political philosophy, and in philosophical bioeth-
ics. These include Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), Humanity Enhanced:
Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies (2014), The Mystery of Moral
Authority (2016), Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics (2017),
The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism (2019), and At the Dawn
of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement (2021).

ix
 List of Contributors

Emma L Briant is a scholar who researches contemporary propaganda and information war-
fare, and its governance in an age of mass-surveillance. She is Associate Professor of News and
Political Communication at Monash University, Melbourne, a Fellow at Bard College and
Associate at University of Cambridge Centre for Financial Reporting & Accountability. Dr.
Briant regularly contributes journalism and op-eds to major outlets and has two books Bad
News for Refugees, (Pluto Press, 2013, co-authored with Greg Philo and Pauline Donald)
and Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change (Manchester University
Press, 2015). She has served as advisor for several documentary flms including, as Senior
Researcher for Oscar-shortlisted Netfix flm ‘The Great Hack’. She is now fnalizing her
third book Propaganda Machine and working on a fourth the co-edited Routledge Handbook
on the Infuence Industry with Vian Bakir, Bangor University, UK.

Raphael Cohen-Almagor, DPhil, St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford; Professor

of Politics, Founding Director of the Middle East Study Centre, University of Hull, and
Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Raphael taught,
inter alia, at Oxford (UK), Jerusalem, Haifa (Israel), UCLA, Johns Hopkins (USA) and
Nirma University (India). He was also Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, Washington DC, and Distinguished Visiting Professor, Faculty of Laws,
University College London. In 2022, he was a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, and in 2023 he is The Olof Palme Visiting Professor,
Lund University, Sweden. Raphael has published 19 books and more than 300 articles in the
felds of politics, philosophy, media ethics, medical ethics, law, sociology, history and poetry,
including most recently Confronting the internet’s Dark Side (CUP, 2015), Just, Reasonable
Multiculturalism (CUP, 2021) and The Republic, Secularism and Security (Springer,
2022). He is now writing Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Confict: A Critical Study of
Peace Mediation, Facilitation and Negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Raphael was a
co-founder of Israel’s “Second Generation to the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance”
Organization, the founder of The University of Haifa Center for Democratic Studies, and
the founder of The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Medical Ethics Think-tank. Presently he is
the Founding-Director of The University of Hull Middle East Study Centre.

Sue Curry Jansen is Emeritus Professor in Media and Communication at Muhlenberg

College, Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on freedom of expression and obstacles to it, the
sociology of knowledge, propaganda, gender and technology, and the intellectual history of
the Progressive Era. Her most recent book, Stealth Communications: The Spectacular Rise of
Public Relations (2017) examines the relationship of democracy and PR, the role of PR fxers
in international affairs, the role of PR in social movements, and efforts to reform it.

Chrysi Dagoula is an Assistant Professor of International Media and Communications

Studies at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, at the University of
Nottingham. Her research is in journalism, social media, and social and political change.
She is the author of News Journalism and Twitter: Disruption, Adaption and Normalisation
(2023, Routledge). She is also the author of Mapping the Greek Journalistic Twitter: a theo-
retical and practical approach (2019, Metamesonykties) and the co-editor of the volume
6+1 Proposals for Journalism: Safeguarding the Field in the Digital Era (2022, Intellect
Books).

x
 List of Contributors

Simon Dawes is Maître de conférences (Senior Lecturer) at Université de Versailles Saint-

Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), France. He is the author of British Broadcasting and the Public-
Private Dichotomy: Neoliberalism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan,
2017) and co-editor (with Marc Lenormand) of Neoliberalism in Context: Governance,
Subjectivity and Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is also the founding editor of
the open access journal, Media Theory, and the editor-in-chief of French Cultural Studies.

Thomas Docherty is Emeritus Professor of English and of Comparative Literature at the

University of Warwick. He has published on many areas of English and comparative literature
from the renaissance to the present day, and he specialises in the philosophy of literary criti-
cism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy
and literatures. A key strand of his recent work has concentrated on matters of cultural policy
related to international higher education – for example, The New Treason of the Intellectuals
(2018), Universities at War (2014) and For the University (2011).

‘Chris’ Fei Shen is associate professor in the Department of Media and Communication,
City University of Hong Kong. His research covers a wide range of topics, including pub-
lic opinion, political communication, new media, audience and consumer behaviour analy-
sis, computational social sciences, and health/science communication. He won the Google
Faculty Research Award in 2014 and the Facebook Foundational Integrity Research Award
in 2020 and during 2015-2016 he was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center,
Harvard University. He was the associate editor of Communication Methods and Measures
and is currently the associate editor of the Asian Journal of Communication.

Helen Fenwick, LLB, BA, is Professor of Law at Durham University Law School, and a
Human Rights Academic Consultant to Doughty Street Chambers. She specialises in human
rights, especially in relation to freedom of expression and the ECHR. She is author of Media
Freedom under the Human Rights Act (OUP 2006, with G Phillipson); Volume 88A Fifth
Edition, Halsbury’s Laws of England new section ‘Rights and Freedoms’ (2013); Civil
Liberties and Human Rights (Routledge, 5th edn 2017). Recent journal articles include
‘Protecting free speech and academic freedom in universities’ (with I Cram) (2018) 81(5)
Modern Law Review 825-873; ‘Prevent, free speech, ‘extremism’ and counter-terror interven-
tions: exploring narratives about chilling expression in schools’ [2020] Public Law 661-679,
with D Fenwick; ‘Exploring narratives about ‘Cancel Culture’ in UK educational/employ-
ment settings under the ECHR’ 2022 in European Yearbook on Human Rights, P Czech,
editor (2022); Vol 73 NILQ No AD1 26-73 (with F Brimblecombe) ‘Protecting private
information in the digital era: making the most effective use of the availability of the actions
under the GDPR/DPA and the tort of misuse of private information’; ‘Keeping Control
of personal information in the digital age: effcacy and equivalence of tortious and GDPR/
DPA relief’ 138 Law Quarterly Review Issue 3, July 2022, 455-479 (with F Brimblecombe).

Tony Harcup is an Emeritus Fellow in Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffeld in

the UK. Before becoming a journalism educator, he spent decades working as a staff and
freelance journalist within both mainstream and alternative news media. His research on
journalism ethics, alternative journalism, journalism practice and journalism training has been
published in journals such as Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Journalism: Theory,
Practice and Criticism and Communication, Culture & Critique. Tony’s studies of news val-

xi
 List of Contributors

ues, co-authored with Deirdre O’Neill, have been widely cited by scholars around the world.
His single-authored books include Alternative Journalism, Alternative Voices (2013), the
Oxford Dictionary of Journalism (2014), What’s the Point of News? (2020) and Journalism:
Principles and Practice (2022). He is a Life Member of the National Union of Journalists.

Jonathan Hardy Professor of Communications and Media at London College of

Communication, part of the University of the Arts London. His books include Branded
Content: The Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing (2022), Critical Political Economy
of the Media (2014), Cross-Media Promotion (2010) and Western Media Systems (2008).
He is editor of Sponsored Editorial Content in Digital Journalism (2023), co-editor of The
Advertising Handbook (2009/2018) and series editor for Routledge Critical Advertising
Studies.

Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman is Head of the Department of Communication and

Associate Professor of International Journalism at Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong
Baptist University United International College. He holds a PhD from the University of
Leeds. He has taught communication, media, and journalism studies at the University of
Sheffeld and University of Leeds in the UK, the University of Nottingham in China, and the
National Institute of Development Administration in Thailand. His research interests include
post-structuralism, ideology, critical linguistics, political economy of news, comparative jour-
nalism, tourism, and epistemological theory. He has published three books, Journalism and
Foreign Policy: How the US and UK Media Cover Offcial Enemies (2022), Journalism and the
Philosophy of Truth: Beyond Objectivity and Balance(2016), and The Political Economy of News
in China: Manufacturing Harmony (2015).

Dimitrios Kagiaros is an Assistant Professor in Public Law and Human Rights at the
University of Durham. His research focuses on the case law of the European Court of Human
Rights in relation to Freedom of Expression and, in particular, the Court’s framework for the
protection of whistleblowers under Article 10 ECHR. He has also published on the use of
European Consensus by the European Court of Human Rights, and the potential for ECHR
rights to protect individuals from destitution. He serves as a member of the editorial board
of The European Convention on Human Rights Law Review.

Geoff Kemp is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Auckland. He gained his PhD
at King’s College, Cambridge. His publications include an account of Locke’s writings on
liberty of the press in John Locke, Literary and Historical Writings (2019) the edited volume
Censorship Moments (2014) and he is general editor, with Jason McElligott, of the four-
volume collection Censorship and the Press, 1580-1720 (2009). A recent article is “Politics,
Law, and Constructive Authorship: John Freke and ‘The Most Infamous Libel That Ever
Was Written’,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 84 (2021) 745-81.

Ezequiel Korin is a communications and marketing practitioner with nearly thirty years
of experience across several industries. As a former assistant professor of journalism and
media production, Dr. Korin’s research interests include censorship, newsroom practices
in Latin America, and digital communication among Spanish-speaking diasporic com-
munities.

xii
 List of Contributors

Paul Lashmar is a former Head of the Department of Journalism at City, University of

London (2019-2021). He is a Reader in Journalism, and his research interests include media
freedom, investigative journalism, intelligence-media relations and organised crime report-
ing. He has been an investigative journalist since 1978 and has been on the staff of the
Observer, Granada Television’s World in Action current affairs series and The Independent. He
is currently writing a history of the Drax family of Dorset. Recent books include Spies, Spin
and the Fourth Estate: British Intelligence and the Media (2020) and Investigative Journalism,
third edition, co-edited with Hugo De Burgh (2021).

Jairo Lugo-Ocando, PhD is a Professor in Journalism Studies and current Dean of the
College of Communication at the University of Sharjah, U.A.E. He is author of several aca-
demic books, peer reviewed journal articles and other academic publications. His recent titles
include, ‘Science Journalism in the Arab World. The Quest for ‘Ilm’ and Truth’ (Palgrave,
2023) ‘The News Media in Puerto Rico. Journalism in Colonial Settings and in Times of
Crises’ (Routledge, 2020), ‘Media & Governance in Latin America. Towards a Plurality
of Voices’ (Peter Lang, 2020) and ‘Foreign Aid and Journalism in the Global South. A
Mouthpiece for Truth’ (Lexington Books, 2020). He worked as a journalist, correspondent
and news editor for several media outlets in Latin America and continues to be engaged with
the mainstream news media as regular commentator of Al-Jazeera and columnist in several
newspapers.

Noha Mellor is a Professor in Media at the University of Sharjah, UAE. She is the author or
editor of numerous books about Arab media, including Arab Digital Journalism (Routledge,
2022), and Routledge Handbook on Arab Media (Routledge, 2020).

Bruce Mutsvairo, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at the
University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. His research focusses on three main areas: the
interplay between journalism, media and democracy; the intersection of press freedom,
safety of journalists and confict; digital and data dissidents, citizen journalists and activ-
ists’ use of online-based technologies, including social media platforms to infuence political
change under the prevailing misinformation ecology. A former journalist with the Associated
Press, he has published numerous scholarly books. He edits and curates the Oxford
Bibliographies’ spotlight platform for the Global South on behalf of Oxford University Press.
He also co-edits the Palgrave/IAMCR book series Global Transformations in Media and
Communication Research and the Palgrave Studies in Journalism and the Global South, which
he co-founded. In 2023, he launched a new Brill book series Technology, Power and Society
together with UU colleagues Dennis Nguyen and Jing Zeng.

Imen Neffati is a historian of contemporary France, interested in racial, religious and gen-
der identities and how they intersect. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College,
University of Oxford where she is fnishing her frst monograph: a critical biography of the
French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo focusing on the three principles of liberté, laïcité,
and fraternité.

Tom O’Malley is Emeritus Professor of Media, Aberystwyth University and writes on press
and broadcasting history. His publications include: Closedown? The BBC and Government
Broadcasting Policy, 1979-1992 (1994); with Clive Soley, Regulating The Press (2000); with

xiii
 List of Contributors

David Barlow and Phillip Mitchell, The Media in Wales (2005); with Janet Jones (eds)The
Peacock Committee and UK Broadcasting Policy (2009);with Siân Nicholas (eds) Moral
Panics, Social Fears, and the Media (2013) and Newspapers, War and Society in the 20th
Century (2019). He co-founded the journal Media History and is currently completing a
study of the UK press in the Second World War.

Julian Petley During his career, Julian has moved back and forth between working in the
media and teaching about the media, and although he has been a full-time academic for
the past twenty-six years he is still an active freelance journalist, now publishing mainly
online in sites such as Open Democracy, The Conversation, and Inforrm. He is also a mem-
ber of the editorial board of the British Journalism Review and of the advisory board of
Index on Censorship. As a member of the National Council of the Campaign for Press and
Broadcasting Freedom and a supporter of Hacked Off he actively campaigns for media which
are both free from restrictions which stop them from performing their proper social func-
tions but, equally importantly, behave responsibly and display the same degree of openness
and public accountability which they habitually demand from other institutions. This work
involves making numerous submissions to offcial enquiries of one kind or another (includ-
ing the Leveson Inquiry), giving evidence to parliamentary select committees, liaising with
like-minded civil society groups, and maintaining a high media profle.

Adam Possamai is Professor of Sociology and Deputy Dean of the School of Social Sciences at
Western Sydney University. He has recently edited with Anthony Blasi, The Sage Encyclopedia
of the Sociology of Religion (2020) and with Giuseppe Giordan, The Social Scientifc Study
of Exorcism in Christianity (Springer, 2020). He is the author of Religion and Change in
Australia (with David Tittensor, Routledge, 2022) and The i-zation of Society, Religion, and
neoliberal Post-Secularism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).

Jordi Pujol, PhD is Associate Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Church
Communications (Pontifcal University of Santa Croce, Rome). He is a catholic priest orig-
inally from Barcelona (1975). His research is particularly focused on three areas: Ethical
dilemmas related to freedom of expression in Europe and the U.S., and the challenges of
exercising freedom of expression online. Latest book: The Collapse of Freedom of Expression:
Reconstructing the Foundations of Modern Liberty (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).
Transparency and Church communications. The right to information within the Church,
particularly in areas such as abuse and governance. Latest book: Trasparenza e Segreto nella
Chiesa Cattolica (Venezia: Marcianum Press, 2022). Privacy, digital identity and data pro-
tection, particularly the impact of the GDPR in Church governance. Latest book: Chiesa e
protezione dei dati personali (Roma: Edizioni Santa Croce, 2019).

Tongzhou Ran is a third-year Ph.D. student at the School of Media and Communication,
University of Leeds. His Ph.D. project studies the representation of the West in Chinese
state media. He is interested in nationalism, Chinese politics, and postcolonialism in China.

Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale is an award-winning author and educator in the

Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor in Ontario,
Canada and currently serves as Chair of the Graduate Program in Communication and Social
Justice. She is the author of Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Culture War and the

xiv
 List of Contributors

Politics of Political Correctness (1998) and Cold Breezes and Idiot Winds: Patriotic Correctness
and the post-9/11 Assault on Academe (2011), both of which examine right-wing ‘culture
wars’ and the corporate-sponsored infrastructures that have historically supported and ena-
bled them. She has also published more than 30 book chapters and journal articles on topics
ranging from social theory and critical pedagogy to the right’s weaponization of free speech.

Julie Seaman recently retired from the tenured faculty at Emory Law School, where she
taught courses and seminars on evidence, constitutional law, and freedom of speech from
2001 to 2022 and served as associate dean of academic affairs from 2017 to 2020. Professor
Seaman takes an interdisciplinary approach to legal scholarship, considering the implications
of brain science, social science, and cognitive psychology to various legal questions. Her most
recent work focuses on fndings in the feld of cyberpsychology as they relate to social media
speech and the First Amendment. She is also a longtime board member and former board
President of the Georgia Innocence Project, a non-proft organization that works to free
wrongfully convicted individuals using DNA evidence.

Weiying Shi is a PhD student at the Department of Media and Communication, City
University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include political communication, public
opinion and new media.

Kristin Skare Orgeret, Dr. Art is Professor at the Department of Journalism and Media
Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Norway where she co- heads the research
group MEKK and organizes annual international conferences on the safety of journalists. She
heads the Norwegian Research Council funded project ‘Decoding Digital Media in African
regions of Confict’ (DD-MAC) with partners from the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Mali, and
with Norwegian SIMULA (2021–2025). Orgeret has been working with journalism, lectur-
ing, and research in several African and Asian countries, and has published extensively within
the feld of journalism, media and freedom of expression.

John Steel is Research Professor in Journalism in the School of Humanities and Journalism
at the University of Derby. His research interests span the intersection of democracy, free
speech, media and participation with a current focus on public understanding of and engage-
ment with journalism norms, ethics and regulation.

Claire Taylor is a principal lecturer in Human Resource Management at Nottingham Trent

University. Claire completed her doctorate in 2018 which focused on employment relations,
social media surveillance, sousveillance, misbehaviour, identity, employee voice and aes-
thetic labour. She has published in New technology, Work and Employment and is currently
developing a research monograph for Routledge Studies in Management, Organisation and
Society (USA) based on her doctoral thesis.

Lada Trifonova Price is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the Department of Journalism

Studies, University of Sheffeld, UK. Her current research focuses on challenges to media
freedom and journalistic practice in Eastern and Southern European democracies as well
as examining physical and psychological threats to safety of journalists. She has published
several papers on journalism practice in fragile democracies, examining a range of threats to
press freedom, censorship and self-censorship, ethical challenges, and media corruption. She

xv
 List of Contributors

is the editor of the Routledge Companion to Journalism Ethics published in 2021 and is cur-
rently editing a special journal issue on trauma literacy in global journalism education and
practice for the Journalism, Media & Communication Educator due in the spring of 2023.

Paul Whickman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Derby where he is also
the Programme Leader for the MA in English. His research interests lie in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and, most particularly, the Romantic-period poets Byron, Shelley,
Keats and Wordsworth. He has published articles in journals such as The Keats-Shelley Review
and has also served as an academic advisor for Gale/Cengage on both Lord Byron and
Percy Shelley. Paul’s monograph Blasphemy and Politics in Romantic Literature: Creativity
in the Literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley was published by Palgrave in 2020. Paul has also
published on censorship and free speech more broadly and recently contributed a chapter to
Charlotte Lydia Riley (ed). The Free Speech Wars: How did we get here and why does it matter?
(Manchester University Press, 2021).

Ryusaku Yamada is Professor of political theory at Faculty of International Liberal Arts,

Soka University, Japan, since 2014. Ryusaku obtained a PhD in politics from the University
of Sheffeld in 2002. His felds of expertise include democratic theory, mass society theory,
citizenship studies, and feminist political theory. He currently engages himself in reconsider-
ing political and social thought of Karl Mannheim in England in the 1930s and 1940s. His
major works written in English are Democracy and Mass Society: A Japanese Debate (Tokyo:
Gakujutsu Shuppankai, 2006); ‘“Mass society” and “civil society” in postwar Japan’, in
Globality, democracy and civil society, ed. by T. Carver and J. Bartelson (Abingdon: Routledge,
2011); and ‘Mannheim, mass society and democratic theory’, in The Anthem Companion to
Karl Mannheim, ed. by D. Kettler and V. Meja (London: Anthem Press, 2018). Ryusaku
was also involved in translation projects of English books into Japanese, including Chantal
Mouffe’s The Return of the Political, David Held’s Democracy and the Global Order, Michael
Kenny’s The Politics of Identity and Carole Pateman’s The Disorder of Women.

Yuan Zeng is a lecturer at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds.
Her research interests focus on the interplay between media and politics, mainly in the areas
of journalism studies and political communication. She is currently working on the role of
social media in China’s political communication. She is the author of Reporting China on the
Rise: Habitus and Prisms of China Correspondents (Routledge, 2019).

xvi
 INTRODUCTION
Censorship and freedom of
expression in turbulent times

John Steel and Julian Petley

We write this introduction in turbulent times. A war raging in Europe and rising tensions
between superpowers on the international stage; a global energy crisis, in part fuelled by
Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and its apparent animosity towards western powers; the
ongoing economic and social impacts of the Covid pandemic; and the political and eco-
nomic fall-out from the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) exit from the European Union. All taking
place within a context in which the environmental impacts of human activity are leading us
towards a catastrophic tipping point for life on the planet. Within such tumult we observe
some familiar trends, most notably the rise of both populist and corporate entities seeking to
take advantage of deepening social cleavages to advance their agendas. Extremist ideologies,
particularly from the right, are in the ascendancy, with freedoms and rights being eroded
even in purportedly liberal societies such as the UK.
A particularly notable feature of this authoritarian turn in many western democracies is the
manner in which right-wing forces of one kind or another have increasingly mobilised the
issue of freedom of expression for their own ideological ends. At the risk of oversimplifca-
tion, one could argue that, in the past, those on the conservative right were mainly in favour
of censorship and those on the liberal left were largely opposed to it. And the kinds of battles
which were waged in Britain and the United States (US) in the 1960s and 1970s over the
rise of so-called “permissiveness” would seem to bear out such a proposition. However, only
up to a point, as, during this period, sections of the feminist movement, which one would
generally associate with left-liberal values, began to campaign against certain types of images
of women in the mainstream media. As noted in Eric Barendt’s two chapters in this volume,
a particular target of their wrath was pornography, both soft- and hard-core, which, they
argued, by stereotyping and demeaning women actually encouraged men to regard them in
a negative light and indeed to be violent towards them. In their view, then, women’s free-
dom to live their lives unthreatened and unmolested trumped the media’s right to freedom
of expression in this area. And in the twenty-frst century, others of a left-liberal persuasion
have increasingly taken a similar line on representations – and not only pictorial ones – of
people of colour.
Calls from those who argued that certain forms of expression encouraged and promoted
misogyny and racism, and thus should be restricted, were soon met with loud resistance from
the right – particularly, but by no means exclusively, the authoritarians and populists gathered

DOI: 10.4324/9780429262067-1 1
 John Steel and Julian Petley

under the alt-right banner – who have insistently characterised such demands as exemplifying
“cancel culture” and a “free speech crisis” while caricaturing those who make them as “snow-
fakes”. In many western democracies, and most certainly in the UK and US, this ushered in
the current era of “culture wars”, although as Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale makes abun-
dantly clear in her chapter in this volume, these have lengthy antecedents, particularly in the
US, in the war by the right on “political correctness” (This is discussed in a UK context by
Petley [2006, 2019] and Malik [2020: 57–94]). And as John Steel makes clear in his chapter
on the so-called “war on woke” in the UK, what very clearly underlies the demands made by
these particular culture warriors of the right for greater protection for freedom of expression
is actually, in true Orwellian fashion, an insistence that the expression of views with which
they disagree should be discouraged and preferably silenced. After years of agitation by the
Free Speech Union and the uber-culture warriors of the decidedly right-wing think tank
Policy Exchange, aided by an endless stream of lurid stories in the right-wing press about
right-wing speakers at universities being allegedly “cancelled”, the government introduced
in May 2021 the exceedingly inaptly named Freedom of Speech (Higher Education) Act
which was passed unto law in May 2023 This creates, inter alia:

• A statutory tort that will enable students, academics and visiting speakers to seek legal
redress and fnancial compensation for any loss they claim to have suffered as a result
of being “cancelled” or “no-platformed”.
• A new duty for universities to promote lawful freedom of speech and academic free-
dom in higher education in order to be registered as higher education providers and to
be able to access public funding.
• A similar duty for student unions, which will be required to register with the Offce for
Students (OfS), the higher education regulator in England, which will have powers to
fne them if they fail to comply with the Bill’s free speech provisions.
• A new role within the OfS of a Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom,
with a remit to champion freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus, and
responsibility for investigations of alleged infringements of freedom of speech duties
in higher education.

The numerous critics of the Act, which include Index on Censorship, English PEN, Article
19 and the University and College Union (UCU), have claimed that it is based on greatly
exaggerated numbers of alleged incidents of “cancelling” (a judgement that is amply borne
out by the Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights [2018]), that freedom of
expression in universities is already well protected under the Education Act 1983 and that
the Bill, paradoxically, will in all likelihood exert a distinct “chilling effect” on teaching
and research in universities. This is because these institutions are highly liable to discourage
their staff and students from doing anything which might threaten their funding or invite
the unwelcome attentions of the Orwellian-sounding Director for Freedom of Speech and
Academic Freedom. In other words – to encourage them to engage in self-censorship. And
bearing in mind the antecedents of this measure and the motives of its proponents, it is not
exactly diffcult to imagine what kinds of expression are most likely to be targeted by those
invoking its powers. As the barrister and author David Renton (2021) has put it:

Given the context in which it has emerged, the bill is clearly intended to protect right-
wing campaigns, giving them a right to threaten universities in two ways at once. They

2
 Introduction

will use the bill as a shield, demanding that their own speech is protected. They will use
it as a sword, complaining that any radical speech is an attack on them.

Thus, an all too likely scenario is that if a university celebrates International Women’s Day, a
certain kind of men’s rights organisation will insist that the university platforms people who
condemn feminists as “feminazis”. Or that a history course which contains material critical
of the slave trade will have to be “balanced” by one that stresses its benefts.
This might at frst sight seem rather a parochial matter, but in fact it raises in acute form
many of the issues which are central to this volume. The proponents of the Bill act as if eve-
ryone has the inalienable right to visit a university and deliver a speech or lecture, as long
as they remain within the (pretty fexible) limits of the law. But this is absolute nonsense, as
anyone attempting to claim this “right” will very soon discover. Furthermore, as the contri-
butions to this volume make abundantly clear, there is no such thing as an absolute and inal-
ienable right to freedom of expression. Proponents of “free speech fundamentalism” such as
Elon Musk frequently quote the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which
lays down that, among other things: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establish-
ment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press”. However, this does not extend to, for example, obscenity, child abuse mate-
rial, speech that incites illegal conduct (particularly violence), perjury, false advertising and
defamation that causes harm to reputation. Nor does the European Convention on Human
Rights (ECHR), which came into force in 1953, guarantee absolute freedom of expression.
Article 10 may indeed state that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right
shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas with-
out interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”, but it also adds:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may
be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed
by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security,
territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the
protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others,
for preventing the disclosure of information received in confdence, or for maintaining
the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Furthermore, not only is this right by no means absolute but it can be balanced by other
rights, such as Article 8, which concerns the right to respect for private and family life. This
is one of the main reasons why those sections of the British press which specialise in privacy-
busting stories loathe the ECHR and demand that the UK depart from it. The fact that the
Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporates the Convention into UK law, provides, for the
frst time, a degree of statutory protection for freedom of expression, clearly matters to them
not a jot. Indeed, these papers have constantly agitated for the Act’s abolition.
A related argument frequently advanced by the free speech fundamentalists is that curb-
ing freedom of expression, even harmful forms of expression, marks the start of a “slippery
slope”. Liberal critics are issued with dire warnings that if they succeed in censoring the
expression of views that they don’t like, then their own views could well be subject to such
treatment next. Thus we slip from regulation to tyranny. This is also related to the well-worn
“where do you draw the line?” argument, which seems to assume that because some lines are
diffcult to draw at law (as indeed they are), then no lines can be safely drawn at all, which

3
 John Steel and Julian Petley

is absurd and nihilistic, as such lines are constantly being drawn by legislators and the courts
without the arrival of the Inquisition. As Nesrine Malik has put it in a key contribution to the
debate on freedom of expression in these deeply troubled times:

Lines are drawn from to limit drinking, sexual activity and voting by age, abortion
by foetal growth stage, prison sentences by severity of crime. The entire existence of
a functioning society is predicated on the business of drawing lines and distinctions
between things where there are only shades of difference, often in extremely compli-
cated and emotive areas. But somehow, according to the freedom of speech crisis logic,
our ability to do so will collapse when trying to draw a line between the KKK and Black
Lives Matter
(2020: 127)

Since the attempt by the right to capture the notion of freedom expression and to use it
for their own ends is by no means confned to the UK and US (vide Hungary, Poland,
Australia and Brazil, for example), and as this threatens to cloud and confuse its importance
to democratic polities wherever they may be, this issue is worth exploring a little further in
the Introduction, even though it is discussed at greater length in various contributions to
this volume.
As Malik has pointed out, the right-wing has forged its strategy on the myth of a free
speech crisis, whose purpose is

to normalise hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it … [It] is not to secure
freedom of speech, that is, the right to express one’s opinions without censorship,
restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the licence to speak with impunity;
not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the consequences of that expres-
sion.
(2020: 98)

But what has in fact happened, largely because of the growth of the online world but also
because of Fox News in the US and Australia and new channels such as GB News and
TalkTV in the UK, is a veritable explosion of the kind of speech that many fnd bigoted and
intolerant, and against which they have increasingly pushed back. And because the forces of
the right have enjoyed an unimpeded ride online and on channels which share their views (as
well as, in the UK, in papers such as the Mail, Sun, Telegraph and Express), they have come
to expect, as of right, the ability to express those views unimpeded wheresoever they wish,
and to do so without being subjected to any kind of negative reaction. Reasonable objection
and protest are now stigmatised and caricatured as “silencing” or “cancelling” and thus an
assault on the principle of freedom of expression (or rather, free speech absolutism). As Malik
claims, with particular reference to Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence
Party (UKIP): “This is an era when there has never been more airtime given to extremist
views, while constantly having to listen to the purveyors of those fringe views complain
about their lack of platform” (ibid.: 114). These are the people described by Mari Uyehara as
“free speech grifters”, who are “not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se;
they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social media followings, and monetisation”
(quoted in ibid.: 118), goading liberals into kicking back against them and thus enabling the
grifters to represent this as censoriousness and themselves as martyrs of a liberal inquisition.

4
 Introduction

As far as possible putting such culture war histrionics and distractions to one side, the
chapters in this volume provide a series of prisms – historical, philosophical, political, cul-
tural, theoretical – through which current controversies relating to censorship and freedom
of expression may productively be viewed. Freedom of expression is one of the foundational
human freedoms and this volume offers an extensive exploration of this complex notion in
the hope that we can reconsider, re-evaluate and refocus on its signifcance and value in these
tempestuous and troubling times.
This book therefore aims to be a guide for the perplexed in this extremely complex and
rapidly changing area, consisting of comprehensive, authoritative and original scholarship on
the various historical, philosophical, political and cultural parameters of freedom of expres-
sion and its constraints across a wide range of divergent disciplinary areas, time frames,
technologies and geographical contexts. To aid navigation through this terrain, the book is
organised around four themes.
Many of the chapters in this volume either speak to how existing concepts and ideas that
underpin freedom of expression are not fully realised or illustrate that contradictions and
impediments within existing systems and structures are in dire need of reconsideration and
rethinking. Whether this be in relation to the formal mechanisms and procedures which
shape the scope of freedom of expression, the normative formulations underpinning it or the
complexities of networked communication, there is a clear imperative to rethink and reim-
agine the conception of freedom of expression more fully in line with new confgurations of
democracy.
Part I of the book examines important conceptual parameters of freedom of expression,
taking a broad historical tour through the development of freedom of expression as an emer-
gent idea and censorship as a set of practices. Though freedom of expression is often con-
sidered a consequence of Enlightenment thinking, Jordi Pujol’s chapter emphasises some
of the key pre-Enlightenment contributions, principally from the European Renaissance of
the 1500s. From this we move on to more familiar terrain, with Geoff Kemp’s formula-
tion of the Enlightenment’s contribution to the development of freedom of expression and
Russell Blackford’s detailed historical analysis of tolerance and intolerance as an important
consideration in relation to the concept of freedom of expression, particularly with regard
to religious expression. Paul Whickman continues the focus on constraints of expression
in his exploration of legal precedent and literary infuence during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. From here we centre on important foundational elements of freedom
of speech and expression by examining John Stuart Mill and what Kristoffer Ahlström-Vij
suggests is his “aspirational ideal of a discursive society”. He suggests that, though foun-
dational and important, Mill’s justifcation for freedom of expression may be some way off
his and others’ ideal and that a more general defence of freedom of expression may be best
obtained elsewhere given Mill’s particular conception of public discussion. Mill is also picked
up by other contributors to the volume, thereby emphasising his continuing importance in
this domain. Of course, linked to Mill’s argument for freedom of thought and expression is
the notion of individual liberty, and Eric Barendt’s frst contribution in this volume explores
the complex and philosophically multifaceted relationship between free speech arguments
and the conception of individual autonomy. Here he takes us through the various ways in
which the notion of autonomy has been connected to freedom of expression, suggesting
ultimately that this alone is insuffcient as a single foundational argument for freedom of
expression and is less persuasive than the democracy argument which is explored in a number
of chapters in the volume.

5
 John Steel and Julian Petley

Of course, related to the democracy argument for freedom of expression and one of the
important currents running through the history of journalism and arguments for freedom
of the press stems from Bentham’s notion of “security against misrule”, and Jesse Hearns-
Branaman emphasises Bentham’s distinctive utilitarian justifcation for freedom of expres-
sion and the press, which he suggests retains some of its contemporary resonance. Sue Curry
Jansen provides a thoughtful and wide-ranging account of freedom of expression across the
twentieth century. A century which, as she suggests, we can learn much from, not least in
the sense that freedom of expression is fragile, requiring both constant protection and criti-
cal refection on its power. This includes its power to silence as well as its power to liberate.
This is a theme that is also picked up in a number of other chapters in the volume, as we will
see. Curry Jansen’s suggestion to be mindful of freedom of expression’s fragility is followed
by Eric Barendt’s second contribution to this volume, which examines the philosophies
of censorship and control. Though the various philosophies of freedom of expression are
well-established, the same cannot be said for theories of censorship, and Barendt’s chapter
allows us to signal a number of key themes running through its history. The chapter begins
by exploring the censorious implications of some of Plato’s thinking before highlighting cen-
sorship in medieval and Renaissance Europe and later in the England of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Barendt again highlights Mill’s contribution to freedom of expression
but this time with a focus on one of his key critics – James Fitzjames Steven – elements of
which are traced through into the twentieth century. Though the dynamics and instruments
of censorship may have changed from earlier periods, Barendt suggests we would do well to
refect the key philosophical underpinnings of censorship while refecting on contemporary
issues such as disinformation, misinformation and “fake news”.
Part II of the book moves on to examine the range of different political, cultural and,
of course, geographical considerations concerning freedom of expression and its regulation.
Here we begin with a thought-provoking chapter by Ezequeil Korin and Jairo Lugo-
Ocando which emphasises the fact that though freedom of expression has historically been
suppressed in parts of Latin America, opportunities to develop a distinctive and, importantly,
a collective right of freedom of expression have emerged from these turbulent times. They
signal that despite this development, the collective realisation of freedom of expression faces
real pressures and constraints in the contemporary era, primarily via the structural impedi-
ments brought about by corporate norms and values. From this perspective we can see free-
dom of expression constrained by narrow individualism rather than working for the good of
the community.
The Covid-19 pandemic cast a large shadow over the development of this volume and the
contribution from Bruce Mutsvairo and Kristin Skare Orgeret highlights how the pan-
demic also provided new opportunities for censorship and control in Africa, with Nigeria and
Tanzania offered in evidence as case studies. Moving on to northern Africa and specifcally
the Arab region, Noah Mellor focusses on how measures or indices of freedom of expression
do not adequately capture the range of factors and cultural elements which contribute to a
distinctive conception of freedom of expression in the region. Mellor signals how journal-
ists’ and audiences’ understandings of public interest and “public morals” have contributed
to the development of the conception of media freedom in the region, but stresses that the
standards of media freedom, developed in the Global North, do not take such factors into
account, which in her view is a mistake. She goes on to argue that the legacy of colonialism
looms large via these indices and legitimises “the hegemony of western judicial processes,
instead of adopting a more inclusive and multicultural approach”. Again, as with Korin and

6
 Introduction

Lugo-Ocando’s chapter, we see traditional liberal notions of freedom of expression rooted in

western thinking constraining “bottom-up” experiments which might offer something new
and innovative in this context.
China is of course a signifcant country with regard to signalling the range of constraints
on freedom of expression that states can develop, and the volume contains two chapters
which detail the workings of state control and the suppression of freedom of expression in
China. The frst, by “Chris” Fei Shen and Weiying Shi, offers a comprehensive account of
the provisions restricting freedom of expression in China, particularly on the internet. The
chapter details not only the bureaucratic and technological parameters of censorship but also
the cultural disposition towards online censorship practices. This is a topic also explored in
the chapter by Yuan Zeng and Tongzhou Ran.
As various other chapters in Part II of this volume point out, distinctive regional and
cultural forces confront and are entangled within essentially western liberal conceptions of
freedom of expression in different ways. Japanese culture and society are no different, as
Ryusaku Yamada points out in his contribution to the volume. Yamada traces recent trends
towards liberalisation in relation to freedom of expression as coming under increasing pres-
sure from conservative forces within Japanese politics and society. He also notes that despite
freedom of the press and academic and artistic freedoms being constitutionally protected,
just as elsewhere these freedoms are increasingly coming under pressure from conservative
and reactionary shifts within Japanese culture and politics.
Imen Neffati provides an insightful account of the principle of laïcité1 in the French
Republican tradition, highlighting how “conceptions of free speech are contextual, always
shifting according to who is the perpetrator and who is the victim”. Focussing on the fall-
out from the Charlie Hebdo controversy, Neffati signals how laws designed to combat hate
speech, despite being orientated towards principles of tolerance and laïcité, implicitly and
unfairly target Muslims in France. The themes of religious toleration and its complexities
are also followed up by Adam Possamai, who highlights the return of religion to the public
sphere within the context of the advance of neoliberalism in Australia. Here he discusses how
certain faith-based groups perversely exploit anti-discrimination laws by expressing a pro-
tected right to “discriminate” against certain minority groups. He argues that this not only
has implications that limit the freedom of expression of minorities but also has economic and
social impacts which are detrimental to minorities and socially disadvantaged groups.
Part III picks up on some of the cultural and contested themes from Part II and
analyses key controversies which provide useful focal points through which to explore and
examine freedom of expression and its current state of health. The section begins with a
discussion of hate speech, and here Raphael Cohen-Almagor refects on it in relation
to Holocaust denial, which he argues should be treated as a form of hate speech and, as
such, restricted. Some have argued that the same should apply to pornography, or at least
certain forms of it, but in his chapter on pornography, obscenity and indecency Julian
Petley examines the diffculties in legislating against such forms of representation, using
examples stretching from written material in the mid-nineteenth century to online forms
in the present day.
Discussion of the ideological parameters of silencing is continued, from a different perspec-
tive, in Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale’s chapter, as she examines the notions of “political
correctness” and “cancel culture” and their roots in the US. This is also picked up by John
Steel’s contribution which addresses the issue of “cancel culture” in the UK and maintains
that the anxiety around this stems largely from conservative and reactionary responses to

7
 John Steel and Julian Petley

social and cultural change. One of the main arenas in which some claim that “cancel culture”
is rife is in universities. However, Thomas Docherty argues that the real threats to academic
freedom, including freedom of expression, are market logics and “proprietary interests”.
Such “privatisation of knowledge” actively places limits on academic freedom by delegitimis-
ing academics and the scope of their educational and wider civic obligations.
Simon Dawes’s chapter examines the current crises of legitimacy and argues that within
the contemporary neoliberal era, the concept of media freedom is no longer ft for purpose
and may indeed be counter-productive in its current neoliberal individualist formulation. He
suggests we need to “rethink” the notion of media freedom in order to address the deepen-
ing crisis of legitimacy and the respond to the challenges brought about by the neoliberal
context.
Julie Seaman examines online speech, and gossip in particular, via social media, and
in relation to informal mechanisms of control which can impact on freedom of expression
through the enforcing of social norms. Drawing on the work of Elinor Ostrom, she examines
group dynamics and the workings of group norm enforcement, particularly within networks
where visibility and anonymity are optional. Governance of social norms and accepted behav-
iours is also the focus of Claire Taylor’s chapter in which she focusses on the workplace
and how employers make use of social media to monitor and screen current and prospec-
tive employees. However, Taylor also signals how this power of the gaze can be inverted
via sousveillance, in instances where a redressing of the power imbalance is being sought by
employees.
Remaining within the online domain, but this time analysing how the use of cyberattacks
and “secrecy hacking” can disrupt and silence civil society actors and those deemed “undesir-
able”, Emma Briant explores how these practices can undermine and damage social cohe-
sion and provide fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Briant suggests that greater levels of
government transparency and accountability, coupled with higher standards in journalism,
are required to combat these nefarious cyber-enabled infuence operations.
Lada Trifonova Price’s chapter draws our attention to the dangers journalists face in the
course of their everyday lives and the threats posed to media freedom because of the violence
and intimidation that journalists around the world increasingly face. These are clearly forms
of censorship and control and exert a particularly extreme form of chilling effect on the
media. Though there are an increasing number of mechanisms with which to address this
problem, these need to be put into practice far more effectively than is currently the case in
too many countries of the world.
Part IV of the volume examines the range of legal, institutional and technological frame-
works within which freedom of expression is constrained. Julian Petley’s second chapter
focusses on censorship and freedom of expression in the online world. Countries such as
China, as two of the chapters in this collection show, have amply demonstrated that the
internet is very far from a censor-proof zone, but this chapter focusses primarily on the
processes whereby the internet is censored and otherwise regulated in democratic societies.
This is most commonly carried out via intermediaries, mainly internet service providers, in a
process of co-regulation, but the major problem with this is that it results in privatised forms
of censorship, mainly fltering, blocking and surveillance, which are largely invisible, publicly
unaccountable and have little regard for human rights considerations.
Helen Fenwick focusses on freedom of expression in the European Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg and examines how the human rights provisions, particularly in relation
to political speech are broadly supportive of journalism in its attempts to scrutinise the state

8
 Introduction

and policy. However, the chapter also points out how “extremist” political speech may not
be afforded the same protections given extremists’ contempt for the principles of democracy.
She goes on to note that “unquestioned support for established journalism […] will require
revision” given that political speech online, for example in the form of citizen journalism,
has highlighted numerous contradictions and tensions. Dimitrios Kagiaros’s chapter also
focusses on the European Court of Human Rights, this time focussing on the scope of whis-
tle-blower protections which seek to balance out freedom of expression of the whistle-blower
with other qualified rights. He emphasises the importance of critically engaging with the
normative foundations of ECHR case law as a way of assessing the outcomes of judgements.
Overt censorship is often undertaken by nation states in the name of the national security
and Paul Lashmar’s chapter examines the history and development of the use of “national
security” as a pretext for silencing journalists and whistle-blowers in the UK.
A theme running through much of this collection is that insufficiently regulated commer-
cial forces can lead to a form of what has been aptly called market censorship. This is in
complete contradistinction to the still fashionable idea in certain quarters that “deregulating”
media markets will automatically lead to greater freedom of expression in those markets – the
so-called “marketplace of ideas”. Britain’s highly concentrated national press market, and its
much remarked-upon ideological homogeneity and debased journalistic standards, decisively
give the lie to this chimera, and the remaining chapters in this volume all touch on this phe-
nomenon of market censorship in one way or another. Jonathan Hardy’s chapter analyses
advertising and commercial speech and how marketing communications are increasingly merg-
ing with non-advertising content “in ways that intensify but also reframe discussions on adver-
tiser influence”. In this context, the chapter addresses how marketeers have sought to extend
particular protections for commercial speech, sometimes in controversial and contradictory
ways. Hardy suggests that in order to address the “distorting effects of advertiser market con-
trol”, more needs to be done in terms of the regulation of commercial speech. The focus on
regulation is also a feature of Tom O’Malley’s chapter which provides a wide historical sweep
of press regulation in the UK. Again, drawing on the contemporary resonances of Mill’s ideas
on freedom of expression, like a number of other chapters in the volume, O’Malley suggests
we need to rethink the concept of regulation, particularly in relation to the press, in order to
meet new challenges within the information sphere. Aaron Ackerley also takes up the chal-
lenge of attempting to confront and reconfigure existing conceptions of freedom of expression
in relation to the press. He argues, like others in the volume, that we need to break with the
“zombie” ideas which are orientated around negative conceptions of liberty in the Millian
sense. Instead, he argues, we should think in terms of promoting more positive freedoms
which provide the public with access to a wide range of trustworthy and accessible informa-
tion sources which may yield a more democratic and publicly accountable media environment.
The final two chapters in the volume continue the focus on journalism, with Chrysi
Dagoula examining journalists’ use of X* and how the boundaries of journalistic identity are
negotiated. She discusses journalists’ self-censorship and the blurred boundaries between the
personal and professional worlds while highlighting both opportunities and risks, particularly
in relation to the job security of journalists. The final chapter in our volume addresses a key
feature of journalism, but one that is often ignored in relation to questions of press freedom
– namely news values. Here Tony Harcup details the ways in which news production is often
a process of negotiation between the journalist and the news organisation and dependent on

* Formerly known as “Twitter’’.

9
 John Steel and Julian Petley

the levels of autonomy that journalists have. Press freedom in this sense is something that is
often negotiated between the imperatives of the news organisation and journalists’ adher-
ence to the virtues of public interest journalism. There is little outright censorship within the
context of a newsroom, though there are clear rules which help guide practice and ensure
that, in principle at least, news organisations don’t break the law. Instead, there exists a con-
stant negotiation between values and imperatives. Harcup goes on to highlight the tensions
between the commercial and civic obligations that journalists face in bringing news to the
public, hinting ultimately that publics too have some responsibility in acknowledging the
role that news values play in the production process.

Acknowledgements
The genesis of this book was in 2018, some way from its eventual publication date. Inevitably
the Covid-19 pandemic had a signifcant impact on the development of the volume, not least
because, due to diffcult working conditions, not a few of the potential contributors that we
approached turned us down regretfully, and some of those that did agree to deliver failed to
do so. Of course, such things happen normally in the course of putting together an edited
volume, but not, at least in our experience, to the extent that they did in this case. However,
this resulted in our continually revising and refning the contents of the volume and search-
ing out new authors and, in our view, this actually improved upon our original conception.
However, we acknowledge that there are some gaps in the volume where we were unable
to secure contributions from authors in these areas. For example, we would have liked to
have more contributions from the Global South which offer more distinctive and rooted
perspectives on freedom of expression, and also from countries such as Russia, Hungary and
Poland, where freedom of expression is notably under threat. Much to their credit, all of the
authors included in this volume have gone over and above in terms of their contribution
and we thank them for their hard work and continued commitment to the project through
some very diffcult times. We’d also like to thank the publisher Routledge for bearing with
us through this project, with Hannah McKeating and her staff playing an important role in
getting the project into print.

Note
1 The principle of secularism in France where the state assumes a neutral position in relation to reli-
gion.

References
Joint Committee on Human Rights. (2018) Freedom of Speech in Universities. London: House of
Commons, House of Lords.
Malik, N. (2020) We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Petley, J. (2006) “The retreat of reason.” Index on Censorship, 4, 8–14.
Petley, J. (2019) “‘Not funny but sick’: Urban myths.” In J. Curran, I. Gaber and J. Petley, Culture
Wars: The Media and the British Left. Abingdon: Routledge (pp. 58–80).
Renton, D. (2021) “The ‘free speech’ law will make university debate harder, not easier.” Guardian,
22 May, Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/22/the-free
-speech-law-will-make-university-debate-harder-not-easier.

10
 PART I

Concepts and histories

 1
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AS A
PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT CONCEPT
Jordi Pujol

From the printing press to the early newspapers1

While freedom of expression is formally recognised as an Enlightenment concept codifed
after the revolutions of France and America, the seeds of free speech can be traced to particu-
lar pre-Enlightenment thinkers as well as to a historical period in which certain political shifts
and a platform of innovative technology paved the way. In Europe, the arrival of Johann
Gutenberg’s printing press in 1450 allowed for the mass dissemination of texts, and thus
an effective tool for the spread of ideas was born. The reach of ideas had previously been in
the hands of the copyists who manually reproduced texts. Europe was not singular nor the
frst to print texts – in China and Japan a technique of woodcutting (xylography) was used
since the eighth century, the Koreans had a mobile character type that closely resembled
Gutenberg’s2 from the fourteenth century and the Court of Peking had the bulletin Jing
Bao, which became issued daily by the 1800s3 – yet what distinguished Europe was not the
invention of the printing press, but the rapid development of the phenomenon of printing.
Starting in 1466, many printers sprang up in various German cities, and later in Paris and
Venice as well. In 1500, the continent had 250 printing presses and a wide circulation of
texts.4
Hand-written newsletters (frst called novella and later known as the avvisi) were in circu-
lation as early as the fourteenth century. They were made for the elites of the time, that is, for
princes and merchants.5 Throughout the 1500s, the still hand-written avvisi became increas-
ingly commodifed and sold for proft. From the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, news
sheets, literary pamphlets and books (political and religious) were plentiful; all of them were
non-periodical publications, which were sold in bookstores or by street vendors in the cities.6
All these forms of “leafets thus demonstrated, from their origin, the three main functions
of journalism: they provided current information, reported minor events of human inter-
est, and expressed opinions”.7 Some media historians give little consideration to these early
newspapers due to their simplicity and the fact that they were highly localised, but as Nerone
emphasises: “the history of news media becomes interesting at the point where governments
lose their control over the uses of news, making it possible for unoffcial actors to change the
way states behave”.8 The volume of texts, messages and information increased with printers

DOI: 10.4324/9780429262067-3 13
 Jordi Pujol

and found another catalyst in distribution, which was frst linked to commercial transport
(land, sea and river), and then to the postal service. Renaissance Europe was characterised
by the spread of printing and by its postal network, which was accessible to the public and
as a result, it became a crucial agent of change.9 The papal archives chronicle the services of
the cursore pontifcio (papal messenger) and the courier from the beginning of the fourteenth
century.10 The frst postal services established by the European monarchies (the Imperial
post) included: France (1464), England (1478) and the Holy Roman Empire (1502), where
Franz von Taxis11 serving as postmaster, set up postal stations between Brussels and other
European capitals (Paris, Toledo, Innsbruck, Rome, Naples, etc.).12 The feature of periodic-
ity helped to build the new medium of newspapers.13 The proximity and development of the
postal system and the book printing businesses provided the conditions to create newspa-
per printing and circulation. Other scholars think that the diplomatic channels of embassies
constituted the original news network for these early newspapers.14 In 1605 the bi-monthly
periodical Nieuwe Tijdinghen (The News of Amberes) arose, as well as the newspaper Relation
in Strasbourg.15 During the following years the fourishing of weekly gazettes continued and
spread to the major European cities. The frst daily newspapers appeared in Leipzig in 1660,
but they did not become widespread in Europe until the eighteenth century, and a bit later
in the United States.16
Thus, starting with Gutenberg’s printing press, but mostly with the spread of newspapers
in Europe,

news became a tool of competition among the powerful under specifc circumstances:
that’s where the history gets interesting. In Renaissance Europe, partly at least because
of the separation between the religious authority of the Roman Church and the emerg-
ing power of secular rulers, elites challenged each other across a range of issues.
(Nerone, 2005: 14–15)

In fact, recent scholarship is challenging the traditional view that the notions of the public
sphere and of public opinion began in the Enlightenment era,17 as it explores the overall
role of public communication in the city-states of the Italian Renaissance.18 Technological
development explains an important part of the phenomenon, which must be placed in a spe-
cifc historical, political and religious context. “Printed news prompted states and churches
to intensify their effort to control the fow of information” (Nerone, 2005: 17). Each of
them was equipped with different systems of content control and censorship. As Nerone
highlights, “historically, every state has reacted to new communications technologies, from
printing to the most recent digital technologies, with some form of regulation” (Nerone,
2005: 15–16).

The Old Regime and the role of papal pronouncements on printing

After terrible plagues and wars, and the fall of Constantinople (the last bastion of the Eastern
Roman Empire), late ffteenth-century Europe entered a period of immense social and cul-
tural optimism. There were strong developments in trade and banking, and great commer-
cial, political, scientifc and evangelical projects were undertaken, such as the discovery of the
New World in 1492. Humanism arose with a desire for a secular education that was more
concerned with the possibilities of the human being than with theology. Europe found itself
at a time of great cultural and artistic effervescence. On the political level, at the end of the

14
 Pre-Enlightenment

ffteenth century and into the sixteenth, monarchs were further centralising their powers,
increasing bureaucracy to manage their expanding empires. This is the context in which
Machiavelli (1469–1527) formulated his political philosophy.19 The political system of the
Old Regime was based on the throne–altar alliance, a stratifed view of society and economic
interventionalism. The Catholic Church, and later the various Protestant denominations,
were bound to the political authority by close relationships of power. At some periods, it
was diffcult to distinguish between the interests of the absolute monarchies and those of
the churches. The relationship of the Church with political power was delineated by the
famous words of Jesus: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God
the things that are God’s” (Matt 22:21). This dual structure, constituted by the separate
authority of the state and the sacred authority was a novelty with respect to the theocracies
of ancient history, and it remains so in the Muslim world today. This separation of the two
spheres is the deepest guarantee of the various human freedoms that are recognised in the
western world, and which modernity developed as rights. These two societies

[are] related to each other but not identical with each other, neither of which had this
character of totality. The state is no longer itself the bearer of a religious authority that
reaches into the ultimate depths of conscience, but for its moral basis refers beyond
itself to another community. This community in its turn, the Church, understands
itself as a fnal moral authority which however depends on voluntary adherence and is
entitled only to spiritual but not civil penalties.
(Ratzinger, 1988: 161)

The “voluntary adherence” and the role of “moral authority” are the two key principles for
understanding the role of the Church’s legitimacy when it comes to censoring content. Most
of the literature on the question focuses on the execution of these principles, which were
sometimes mishandled and abused by Church offcials, but the legitimacy of the Church’s
role here must be acknowledged.
In Renaissance Europe, Christianity enjoyed a dominant position as doctrine and as an
institution. It was a powerful agent of cultural development, promoting various forms of
communication: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, theatre and more. That
is why the frst impressions of incunabula (printed books) were made in abbeys, bishoprics
and universities of the Church. Now, the printing press was in the service of the Church
and monarchs, as well as people with less honourable interests. All of these found the print-
ing press to be an excellent ally for advancing their ideas. With the increase in translations
of the Bible into vernacular languages and their spread due to the printing press, bishops
grew concerned about the integrity of these unoffcial translations. In many cases, they were
done by people with no experience, or those who were not authorised by the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. Hence, the frst declarations of the authority of the Church on the freedom of the
press were related to that issue. Since books were reproduced by hand until the invention
of the printing press, censorship had been a responsive intervention, meaning that it took
place after the act of writing. With the advent of the printing press and the production of not
only hard copies but multiple copies (of newspapers, books, speeches and lectures), censor-
ship was exercised preemptively. The frst rules on prior censorship date back to the ffteenth
century, and were also applied to theatre and later to flm. Censorship meant “the action of
the public authority by which the expression of certain ideas and opinions in various media
of social communication is controlled, limited, or suppressed” (Del Pozo, 1984: 494), which

15
 Jordi Pujol

is justifed with public or moral reasons and ordered toward the common good of society.
This power was exercised by the King, who in turn professed a religious confession, as either
a Catholic king or a Protestant king: cuius regio eius religio (whose realm, his religion).
According to this legal principle, subjects were to adopt the religious beliefs and authority
of the monarch. Censorship was exercised by the state through an agency, and, in issues
related to morality, the civic power delegated the criteria to the Church, enforcing whatever
she decided. As an example: “In 1521 Charles V issued an edict punishing the publication
of books prohibited by the Church, which examined potentially heretical or immoral works
through the Congregation of the Holy Offce” (Del Pozo, 1984: 494). As a matter of fact,
censorship existed in the Protestant kingdoms as well as the Catholic ones. This power was
not disputed by subjects until the arrival of liberalism, which brought a greater awareness
of individual rights and freedoms. The Pope’s frst offcial conformity with censorship was
in 1479 with the document Accepimus litteras vestras (March 17, 1479), whereby Sixtus IV
praises, supports and grants the use of ecclesiastical censorship20 for unorthodox books.21
This document of the Pope is the frst norm of ecclesiastical censorship established within
the Church; in this case, it was directed toward printers, merchants and readers. Within a
few years, the frst pronouncement for the entire Church would arrive with the Bull Inter
multiplices (November 11, 1487). With it, Pope Innocent VIII arranged for the ecclesiastical
censorship of books for all Christianity, entrusting the bishops with the execution of this task
of control. All texts were examined before going to print, and the approval of the ecclesi-
astical authority was required in order to print them (certifcate of Imprimatur), otherwise
penalties of varying intensities were incurred. The institution of the Index as an organised
mode of censorship was completed at the Council of Trent.22
As one can infer, the origin of the confict between censorship and freedom of expression
is due to the result of a historical period in which religious and political power were in many
ways undifferentiated. The key players of power and culture in this period were empires and
ecclesiastical actors. It was a matter of time for each one to rediscover the original separation
between politics and the sacred. Meanwhile, some important philosophical and legal changes
regarding the notion of freedom were about to take place: the subjectivity shift with Ockham
that determined the enlightened notion of political freedoms, and the universalisation of
rights to all men and to all nations by Vitoria, grounding rights on the equal human condi-
tion.

An important shift that determined the future notion

of individual freedom in modernity23
A key player, whose philosophical position laid groundwork for the advancement of the
person’s right to freely hold and express ideas, was William of Ockham (1285–1347). Best
known for his metaphysical nominalism and rejection of universals,24 he recognised only the
existence of observable elements and eliminated any concept that went beyond the particular.
By rejecting universals, he virtually rejected any attempt to ground nature in a metaphysical
order, and he imposed the need for a physical basis of explaining the individual.25 This con-
stituted a complete shift away from the classical conception of Aristotle, Plato, Seneca and
Cicero, who upheld individual freedom associated with a telos. Aristotle thought that there
was a “common view of the good” of all members of the polis. Being a good person was, for
him, very closely linked to being a good citizen. For Aristotle, virtues had a place within the
social context of the city-state.26 In contrast, Ockham is known for his will-based ethics, in

16
 Pre-Enlightenment

which subjective intentions (not actions) are the most important thing, and where freedom
is an undetermined choice of personal preferences.27 Ockham’s thought inspired Luther’s
notion of freedom as “choice” in De servo arbitrio (1525), and further modern develop-
ments on autonomous freedom that led – in many cases – to individualism28 and voluntarism.
Ockham also replaced the classical legal thought and its realistic notion of right (as the right
thing that is due) with the notion of subjective right, whereby something gains the status
of a right because it is attributed to a subject. Under this justifcation, the rights become a
formal faculty (instead of what it is due). Hervada explains that even though Ockham does
not formally use the terms “natural right” and “positive right”, the frst appears as a moral
precept – not as right in the strict sense – and only the second is truly a right.29 For him, right
is defned as a potestas or facultas (power or faculty) and is exclusively bound to the mandate
of the legislator, since the individual is the only real grounding principle, rather than a rela-
tionship with any telos or metaphysical notion.
Ockham’s factual and empirical approach would give rise to a system of formal rights that,
by virtue of being declared, are owed to them. In this sense, we have gone from an under-
standing of justice as “human cooperation” (something intrinsic to the reality of human life),
to understanding justice as mere “impartiality” or as an “ethic of rules”.30 The law, then, is
no longer the “just” solution, but rather a set of rules determined by the state to institute
social order.31 The identifcation of justice with the protection of subjective rights was not the
original concept of the law, however, and, on this point, Hannah Arendt agrees. She argues
that the law, as a catalogue of particular prescriptions, is only three centuries old:

The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action (the idea that politi-
cal activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern and
found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy) nor was it a catalogue of
prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the
Decalogue.
(Arendt, 1998: 63)

A climax occurred in the seventeenth century with the work of Hobbes. Founder of the
social contract theory and of the modern idea of the state, he formulated the modern individ-
ualist philosophy of law, based on nominalist principles of the fourteenth century. Ultimately,
modern law rejected an Aristotelian system and, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centu-
ries, the classical notions of justice (particular, distributive, commutative) were blurred until
they almost disappeared from the study of law.

Francisco de Vitoria’s framework of equal rights for all peoples and nations
The concept of freedom in the public sphere originated and developed throughout the his-
tory of ideas, in which Ockham’s approach forms one of its frst roots. Another Dominican
friar – this one from Spain – Francisco de Vitoria, developed a doctrine at the beginning
of the sixteenth century that laid the foundations of human rights and international law,
building a bridge between the Old Medieval Regime and secular Modernity. Vitoria based
international law on the law of nations (ius Gentium).32 The legal and philosophical founda-
tions that accompany his approach link very well with what would later become the con-
versations about universal human rights in an international community, in which all nations
with equality of rights participate. Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) used the geographical

17
 Jordi Pujol

discoveries of the New World as an opportunity to develop a political and legal doctrine
based on the anthropology of Thomas Aquinas, according to which all human beings are
free and equal by nature. This equality extends to all nations, including indigenous popu-
lations. His postulates were very novel because they broke with the Aristotelian theory of
natural slavery and because they criticised the medieval theocratic theory. Vitoria, inspired by
Christian universalism,33 defended a radical equality between nations, without distinguishing
between Christian and non-Christian nations. The new international landscape that was cre-
ated with the geographic discoveries of the era imposed a new legal order which, until then,
had been strongly based on canon law and theology. The head of Salamanca abandoned
the identifcation between political and divine power which upheld the sovereignty of kings
by divine right. Vitoria advocated popular sovereignty limited by the natural order, that is,
people’s free participation, their ability to give consent and natural law.34 The common good
imposed respect for the natural rights of human beings who were subject to a political com-
munity. Vitoria proposed a new concept of national sovereignty limited by a common good
of humanity (universal human goods that are prior to national interests).

All nations of the globe, without distinction of race, culture, or religion, are con-
nected to each other by the fact that they are part of a universal community. (…)
All nations have equal dignity, equal rights and duties. The universal common good
includes national rights and implies obligations of justice and solidarity to contribute
to the same common good.
(Fazio, 1998: 74)

Vitoria’s approach combines individual rights and duties with the rights and obligations of
nations, as a great human family that is organised politically.35
Within this theoretical – philosophical-juridical – framework of human rights and obliga-
tions, freedom of expression emerges as a good to be protected by human political society,
along with other goods such as information, one’s conscience and the freedom to profess any
religion. The right to freedom of expression protects the human good of public, free and
rational discussion, which is critical for personal development and public deliberation in a
democracy. The declarations of rights at the end of the eighteenth century are a milestone
in the journey begun by Vitoria. His theory was not echoed in an era in which the birth of
nation-states was privileged. Modern international law did not use his concept of interna-
tional law (between nations), but academics have begun to appreciate his intuitions as they
explore global legal solutions to conficts of individual rights. The model of law for the peo-
ple that Vitoria proposes – unlike the model centred around national borders – fts very well
in the current international context with increasingly global problems: fnancial, bio-tech
and ecological crises, pandemics and mass movements of migrants and refugees, as well as
those which specifcally affect freedom of expression: manipulation of information, theft of
personal data, the distribution of falsehoods and hate speech online, etc. These crises require
solutions that go beyond the territorial confnes of nations.
There is a burgeoning interest in research on global law,36 understood as a common law of
humanity that transcends the law of individual states and international law between nations.
This framework is inspired by the legal tradition inherited from the Roman ius gentium and
the Medieval ius commune, with elements of international Law, from the ius universal and
the international law forged in the Enlightenment.37 It is a transition from an international
society of nations to a global community, which makes it a priority to place the person, and

18
 Pre-Enlightenment

not only the sovereignty of the state, at the centre of the system.38 This requires nation-states
to renounce specifc aspects of their sovereignty through international treaties.39 Habermas
defnes it thus: “A world dominated by nation-states is indeed in transition toward the post-
national constellation of a global society”.40 Understanding that the origins of the notion
of freedom of expression and its protection are rooted in an inherited tradition41 is essential
for having a productive public conversation about rights and international law in the future.

Notes
1 For valuable suggestions and advice, I am grateful to Juraj Kittler.
2 See Briggs and Burke (2005:13)
3 See. Albert, Sánchez Aranda and Guasch (1990: 14).
4 Ibid, 13–14.
5 For a deeper understanding of the argument see Infelise (2002).
6 See. Albert, Sánchez Aranda and Guasch (1990: 15).
7 Ibid, 16, our translation.
8 Nerone (2005: 13).
9 See Behringer (2006: 340).
10 “From the end of the thirteenth century the documents tell us about cursors and couriers, the latter
organized according to commercial criteria, and made use of by the curia”. See Fedele and Gallenga
(1988: 4). The expenses annotated in the books of the Curia use the Latin term cursor that stands
for two different functions: cursore pontifcio and corriere (merchants’ courier). Fedele says that
there is no clarity on this.
11 The term “taxis” derives from this family’s surname, which was linked to the Habsburg emperors
from 1490 onward. See Behringer (1990).
12 See Behringer (2006: 343–344).
13 In 1550, serial-numbered newspapers that reported on a regular basis appeared in some cities in
Europe. These periodical news reports were located in places with large post offces. See Behringer
(2006: 349–350).
14 The opinion held by a group of European communication history scholars was published recently in
a joint work: See Raymond and Moxham, (2016). This view has been challenged by other scholars
like Christ (2005: 35–66) and Kittler (2018: 199–222).
15 See Behringer (2006: 354).
16 See Albert, Sánchez Aranda and Guasch (1990: 28-33).
17 Historians such as Landi (2006); De Vivo (2007); Rospocher (2012); Salzberg (2014).
18 “It was Belgian historian Henry Pirenne (1915) who, half a century before Habermas, already
claimed that the roots of modern Western democracy—such as elementary forms of self-govern-
ment, rational public debate, and argumentation—need to be searched for among the nascent
urban communities of the High Middle Ages (ca. 1000–1300 CE). (…) At the peak of the medieval
period, the political culture of European urban communes already required that the most impor-
tant legislative initiatives and electoral acts be approved by popular acclamation, which essentially
established public opinion as a normative ideal by turning it into a source of political legitimation”
(Kittler, 2016: 111).
19 In his work The Prince (1513), Niccolò Machiavelli suggests that the main goal of this is the conser-
vation of power, for which he manipulates human tendencies and passions. His political philosophy
– unlike that of the classical tradition – is based on pragmatism and is independent of any ethical or
moral reference.
20 That is to say, the ecclesiastical authorisation to publish books relating to faith and Catholic doc-
trine. We must keep in mind that religious and political power had not yet been separated in the
Christian kingdoms, which were all still Catholic at that time, as the Peace of Westphalia was still
nearly two centuries away.
21 “We have received your letters (...) We have learned with what zeal of the Orthodox faith and with
what prudence they have forbidden the reading, printing, and sale of books infected with heresy,
and have repressed the ignorance of women. As long as this prevails, they judge what they do not
know and believe themselves competent in the Scriptures, they fall into the greatest errors and

19
 Jordi Pujol

become the ruin not only of their own souls, but also the souls of others”. And Sixtus IV continues:
“The art of the press, just as it is considered quite useful because it makes the multiplication of
precious and useful books possible, so it would become quite harmful if those who have it in their
hands were to misuse it, gradually printing what is prejudicial”. Pius IV, Accepimus litteras vestras,
brief, March 17, 1479, in Cebollada (2005: 5ff), 5ff our translation. What Sixtus IV calls “the art
of the press” corresponded to the trade of printing and distribution.
22 Pius IV, De indice librorum, decree, December 4, 1536, in Cebollada (2005: 5ff), which Pius IV
put into effect through the Bull Dominici gregis on March 24, 1564, with the list of books that were
banned for the Catholic faithful. On June 14, 1966 the Holy Offce would eliminate the institution
of the Index.
23 An early explanation of this topic can be found in Pujol, 2023: 201ss).
24 Ockham criticises the realism (philosophical and theological) that postulates harmony between the
universal and the particular. He argues that there is only the individual and rejects the possibility of
the abstraction of a common nature of things. There are only individual things that are different in
each one. “Cualquier realidad singular es en sí misma singular (…) por lo cual si algo es singular, lo
es por sí mismo”; y añade que no debe buscarse “una causa de la individuación (…) sino más bien
de cómo es posible que algo sea común y universal”. William of Ockham, I Sententia, dist 2, q. 6,
in Opera Theologica II: Scriptum in Librum Primum Sententiarum, S. Brown and G. Gal (Eds.),
(St. Bonaventure University, New York, 1970), 196ff.
25 See Juan José Sanguineti, “Individuo y naturaleza en Guillermo de Ockham”, Scripta Theologica
I7(1985/3) 845–861; Olga Larre, Guillermo de Ockham, in F. Fernández Labastida and J.A.
Mercado, (eds.), Philosophica: Enciclopedia flosófca on line, URL: http://www.philosophica.info/
archivo/2013/voces/ockham/Ockham.html.
26 See MacIntyre (1981: 127).
27 Freedom is undetermined because there is no telos. Before and after a choice, the will is undeter-
mined and indifferent. Personal preference is the only cause of the action taken. See: Ockham, IV
Sententia, q. 16, in Opera Theologica VII: Quaestiones in Librum Quartum Sententiarum (Wood
and Gal), 1984: 359); Ockham (1979: 574ff); Ockham (1980: 87).
28 The historian Richard John stresses the importance of not confounding individualism with indi-
viduality (John, 2019: 31).
29 See Hervada (2000: 240–241).
30 This argument is discussed by several contemporary philosophers, who oppose each other. See
Rawls (1973).
31 See Villey et al. (2020: 94).
32 The Roman Ius Gentium was a universal common law, founded in the unity of rational human
nature: quod naturalis ratio inter homines constituit. The novelty of Vitoria is that he changes one
word (quod naturalis ratio inter gentes constituit) and proposes an international law inter gentes,
between independent human groups but with the unity given by human nature. That is to say, an
international law that is both public and private. See Truyol Serra (1946: 51).
33 It is based on the stoic notion of the unity of the human race and the Roman Ius Gentium. Thomas
Aquinas emphasised that the unity of the human race does not only exist at a metaphysical level, but
also on a philosophical, juridical and political level. See Fazio, (1998: 66).
34 See Vitoria (1967: 667–675).
35 Cf. Reginaldo Pizzorni, “Lo ius gentium nel pensiero di del Vitoria”. In I diritti dell’uomo e la pace
nel pensiero di Francisco De Vitoria e Bartolomé de las Casas (Milan: Massimo, 1988), 575.
36 See Domingo (2020); Capaldo (2016); Walker (2015); Dybowski and García Pérez (2018);
Kingsbury et al. (2019); Teitel (2011); González (2016); Twining (2000); Madunic and Kirton
(2009); Rabkin (2005); Archibugi (2008).
37 See Domingo, The New Global Law, 4.
38 Jean Monnet, a founding father of Europe, said in a speech in Washington (April 30, 1952): “We
are not forming coalitions of states, we are uniting people”. (Original: Nous ne coalisons pas des
États, nous unissons des hommes.) Jean Monnet, Mémoires (Paris: Fayard, 1976), vol. 9, 617.
39 See Domingo (2020) chapter 5.
40 Habermas, “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance”, in Cronin
(2006).
41 This is one of the core ideas developed in Pujol (2023).

20
 Pre-Enlightenment

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Scriptum in Librum Primum Sententiarum (New York: St. Bonaventure University).
Ockham, W. (1980) “Quodlibeta I, q. 16.” In J. Wey (ed.) Opera Theologica IX: Quodlibeta Septem
(New York: St. Bonaventure).

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Pius IV, Accepimus litteras vestras, brief, March 17, 1479. In P. Cebollada (2005) Del Génesis a Internet:
Documentos del Magisterio sobre las comunicaciones sociales (Madrid: BAC) 5ff (author translation).
Pizzorni, R. (1988) “Lo ius gentium nel pensiero di del Vitoria.” In I diritti dell’uomo e la pace nel
pensiero di Francisco De Vitoria e Bartolomé de las Casas (Milan: Massimo).
Pujol, J. (2023) The Collapse of Freedom of Expression: Rebuilding the Ancient Roots of Modern Liberty
(Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
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(Princeton: Princeton University Press).
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Raymond, J. and Moxham, N. (eds.) (2016) News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill).
Rospocher, M. (ed.) (2012) Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe
(Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino).
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Truyol Serra, A. (1946) Los principios del Derecho Público en Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid: Cultura
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Twining, W. (2000) Globalization and Legal Theory (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University
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Villey, M. (2020) Filosopia del derecho (Madrid: Rustica).
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 2
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION,
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND
THE LIBERAL TRADITION
Geoff Kemp

Freedom of expression as an article of faith in modern democracy is bound frmly to the

Enlightenment and the liberal tradition, both defned not infrequently in terms of the
advocacy and defence of a liberty to think and communicate without censorship. R.G.
Collingwood wrote in the 1930s that the “outward characteristic of all liberalism is the
fact that it permits the free expression of opinion”, drawing on “memories of a long liberal
tradition” as this “conception of political life has been gradually worked out in Europe and
America during the last three centuries” (1989: 177–8). To stand in the liberal tradition, as
modern liberal democracy does, is to value freedom of expression and vice versa, and being
a tradition implies an accompanying history or genealogy of coming to value free expres-
sion, ideationally and institutionally. This history has been given temporal location as an
Enlightenment legacy, with roots traced to a “long Enlightenment” stretched temporally,
transnationally and partly tautologically to embrace relevant ideas and events from the sev-
enteenth into the nineteenth century across Britain, North America and continental Europe.
Enlightenment liberalism’s tradition of freedom of expression has been characterised, and
perhaps caricatured, as a narrative of progress in theory and practice during which expres-
sion became free of control by state or church, backed by a claim of right, allowing a process
of enlightenment in pursuit of truth or knowledge, serving individuals in their opinions
and interests and empowering the people and democracy, particularly with the expansion of
media (Curran, 2002). Pre-publication censorship and excessive post-publication punish-
ments were successively resisted, preventing governments from shielding themselves from
criticism or intervening unjustifably to shield others. The long-run story typically fnds
opening scenes in John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and in his compatriot John Locke’s
account of natural rights in the Two Treatises of Government (1690) shortly before pre-
publication censorship was abolished in England in 1695. It then moves to Cato’s Letters in
the 1720s and, with national variation, proceeds through the eighteenth century’s further
battles against restriction in Britain, the European Enlightenment and American Revolution,
the latter yielding the US First Amendment, before John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859)
provides a canonical capstone ahead of the further embedding of freedom of expression or
free speech at the centre of modern democracy’s self-image, notably by twentieth-century
First Amendment jurisprudence in the American case.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429262067-4 23
 Geoff Kemp

The present chapter retreads steps in the same basic story, conscious of the critical com-
plexity bypassed by any brief account. In an age troubled by hate speech, disinformation and
media excess, the progress paradigm could be expected to seem too simplistic and optimistic
for ready acceptance. It will not pass unnoticed that the summary version involves a suc-
cession of Englishmen named John (Peters, 2005: 64). Academic efforts to bring historical
scholarship to bear on a developmental paradigm in free expression proceed with contextual
caution to avoid lapsing into triumphal “Whig history” (Ingram, Peacey and Barber, 2020).
Yet elsewhere in western society and its politics, the traditional narrative of free expression
continues to see regular service, drawn on and quoted towards a redemptive end, as an
achievement to stand by. To the extent free expression is endorsed by all legitimate political
positions, all in liberal democracy are effectively “conscripts” of the liberal tradition (Bell,
2014: 689). Equally, scholarly disagreement about the path to the principle, or the idea of
a pathway, does not vitiate agreement on the principle’s basic worth. A writer with more at
stake than most has remarked, “In a free society the argument over the grand narratives never
ceased. It was the argument itself that mattered. The argument was freedom” (Rushdie,
2012: 360).

Liberal tradition as historical narrative

The preceding quotation, as it happens, both does and doesn’t rely on history to vindicate
free expression, and it remains a matter of debate what role the past plays in justifying prin-
ciples we live by, the relation between genesis and validity (Jay, 2022). Political theorists
recently addressing “freedom of speech in the liberal tradition” needed no resort to history
as such, their liberal tradition being a “heritage of critical refection” in which refection not
heritage justifes (Waldron, 1993: 202).1 Any shared inheritance exerts a hold, nonetheless,
and that of free expression arises partly from a conviction that it emerged from a refning
process of argument and trial over time. As one of the most famous passages in the American
free-speech tradition puts the matter, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment” and
“the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of
the market” (Holmes, 2010: 277). A conviction that history vindicates freedom of expres-
sion is reinforced by the accompanying narrative of its historical trajectory.
The liberal tradition in freedom of expression, considered historically, is undeniably a
narrative, which is not to deny its reality or import. Whig history was not the invention of
a wilful historian but itself the product of history and a largely “inescapable inheritance”,
wrote Herbert Butterfeld (1944: 2). One way to glimpse the inheritance from the outside,
nevertheless, may be to consider it not only as a developing set of ideas about freedom of
expression but as a more or less conscious effort to build an identifable tradition, partly in
recognition that tradition can be its own argument. A tradition identifed as “liberal” is apt
for such consideration given that “liberalism” was a term uncoined before the nineteenth
century, meaning earlier fgures are themselves liberal conscripts. It will be suggested that
the explicit notion of a liberal tradition in free expression is not much older than the period
in which Collingwood wrote, a transnational adaptation of what had been considered frstly
a British tradition.
The following genealogy of certain milestone moments therefore pays attention to the
building of tradition as a theme running parallel to other arguments or claims advanced
for free expression, those found in numerous iterations of the story of a free press and free
speech (e.g., Siebert, 1952; Levy, 1985; Keane, 1991, 1–50; Copeland, 2006). The tradition

24
 Enlightenment and the liberal tradition

has its own story, as it were, alongside the narrative of emergent arguments, which as usu-
ally traced roughly ft a threefold scheme: an argument from conscience, an argument from
truth and an argument from democracy (cf. Schauer, 1982; Martin, 2001; Steel, 2012: 9;
Leveson, 2012: 56). Typically, the frst relates most to claims about religious duties, natural
rights and self-expression (or self-fulflment, but not hinging on consequences); the second
centres on the necessity of a “contest of ideas” to yield truth or its closest approximation;
the third centres on the notion of having a watchdog on government and giving each citizen
and public opinion(s) a voice, though support for “democracy” as such arrived late in the
period examined here. One further consideration that can only be touched on, like tradition-
building evident historically but until recently little discussed, is past debate on calumny,
contumely and injuria (Waldron, 2012: 204–233; Shuger, 2015). The harms of hate speech
have brought further rereading of the inherited tradition in our historical moment.

Milton and English beginnings

If the typical opening scene of the liberal story is Milton’s Areopagitica, the scene is set by the
2012 Leveson Inquiry into the British press, where a media owner arrived carrying a copy of
Areopagitica and Justice Leveson’s fnal report offered a “brief history of press freedom” as
“essential background” (The Guardian, Apr 23, 2012; Leveson, 2012: 58).2 It begins:

From the advent of the printing press in 1476 until the end of the seventeenth century,
state licensing meant that the Government and the Church could control the press,
and in particular prevent the printing of seditious or heretical works. State control over
printing tightened when, in 1538, Henry VIII decreed that all new printed books had
to be approved by the Privy Council and registered with the Stationers’ Company. The
licensing regime ended with the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1640. However, in
1643 licensing was reintroduced by Cromwell’s Parliament in an effort to suppress
the publication of material about Charles I. This act moved John Milton to write his
now immortal defence of the free press in The Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of
Unlicensed Printing.
(Leveson, 2012: 58)

The report then delivers Areopagitica’s most-quoted declaration: “Give me the liberty to
know and to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” (Leveson,
2012: 58; Milton, 1959: 560).
The passage is on the one hand a succinct overview undergirding “the commitment of
modern democratic society to freedom of the press”; on the other, history made Manichean
in service of the present, with errors of fact and concision suggestive of deeper distorting
effects in making history serviceable (Leveson, 2012: 58). The challenge, observes one his-
torian, is to avoid “imposing our own, anachronistic presuppositions”, but anachronism is
perhaps integral to tracing a tradition (Como, 2020: 98). Areopagitica is justly famous but
demonstrably by the measure of a period later than its own, being largely ignored when pub-
lished and for some decades afterwards, a reason Milton’s place is the start not the middle of
a liberal tradition: his contemporaries were not of the same mind. Yet Milton was concerned
to be seen to stand within existing tradition, being at “paines to be so much Historical”
in page after page neglected then and in Areopagitica’s afterlife. The tradition, or rather
traditions, invoked were an admixture of republican resort to ancient Greece and Rome,

25
 Geoff Kemp

Protestant appeal to the early and reformed church and a patriot perspective on England
and English as land and language of liberty. He identifed this inheritance with an absence
of systematic control but readiness to act against threats to religion and the polity, opposing
pre-publication censorship while countenancing post-publication punishment. Against this
inheritance Roman Catholicism was depicted as innovating anti-tradition, “drawn as lineally
as any pedigree”, with the Popes of Rome the inventors of press licensing, which “crept out
of the Inquisition” to be imitated by England’s popish episcopate and lead parliament astray,
(493, 505). Religious speech in the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” advanced free speech, as
recently noted, though it did so through the tradition’s internal antagonisms (Bird, 2023).
Areopagitica traced tradition for present purposes, casting literary distinction on essentially
partial and partisan history.
Milton’s history was meant to persuade but he appreciated the issue that gives the lib-
eral tradition an air of paradox, the tradition-justifcation mismatch: “But some will say,
What though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good?” (507). From this
resulted the quotably timeless Areopagitica found in the liberal tradition as, on an infuential
view, “the classic argument for free speech” (Sabine, 1973: 470). The description is defcient
because quotation from Milton’s ringing oratory is not strictly an argument, and because
Areopagitica has no single argument but offers an array of claims born of policy not only
intellectual aims, typical of advocacy of freedom of expression. Nevertheless, three of the
most famous Areopagitica passages serve to illustrate the major strands of argument in the
threefold scheme of conscience, truth and democracy, as well as suggesting the limitations of
schematising: frst, the “conscience” quotation above; second, “Let her and Falshood grap-
ple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter”; and third, in the
epigraph from Euripides, “This is true Liberty when free born men / Having to advise the
public may speak free” (Milton, 1959: 484, 560–1).
The liberal tradition has been drawn to all three, for varying reasons, sometimes not indis-
putably Milton’s reasoning. Areopagitica’s opening address, freely advising “the public”, can
on a modern reading evoke liberalism’s core tenet of securing space around individuals “to
have the freedom to express themselves, to be counted as part of the body politic” (Freeden,
2015, 40). But in Areopagitica the “public” formally addressed was Parliament, even if being
in print implied another, and Milton’s priority was not the formation of authoritative public
opinion “out of doors” through a free press, a political cause in more recent times associated
with the Levellers’ delivery of “Agreements of the People”. Areopagitica spoke less to proto-
democratic politics than to the more fundamental matter, to Milton and most contemporar-
ies, of religion. This underwrote the famous declaration on conscience, later reinterpreted as
a secularised individual right, its form in Leveson’s report, a right of conscience that being
inherent need not be tied down by consequences (or religion). Milton was not unaware of
rights talk, a few months later laying claim to, “licence by the right of nature, and that liberty
wherin I was born, to defend my self publicly against a printed Calumny” (Milton, 1959:
580). In Areopagitica, he referred to freedom to address Parliament as an English birthright
but made no general “rights” claim. The “conscience” quotation was declarative but not
developed in his text. More developed in Areopagitica was his equally famous argument
from truth: liberty of the press was essential to the “scanning of error to the confrmation
of truth”, a contest of ideas. The contest might be in religious or civil matters, but here
too Milton’s driving impulse was “reforming the Reformation”, tolerance in the cause of
Protestant truth rather than diversity itself or taking public opinion as substitute – fnding
and confrming truth, not generating it. From this stemmed Milton’s exclusions, notably

26
 Enlightenment and the liberal tradition

Roman Catholics and royalist cavaliers standing in the way of truth. While opposing pre-
publication censorship, he allowed that “mischievous” printed works might face “the fre and
the executioner”. Milton enjoined a “liberall and frequent” hearing for dissenting voices, but
he would be part of a liberal tradition, so named, only by later conscription (567).

Locke and the “end of censorship”

Before then Milton was recruited within the blended tradition he followed and forged in
Areopagitica, that of free expression as English and Protestant. In the crisis around attempts
to exclude a Roman Catholic successor to the throne by those newly named “Whigs”, press
control was again identifed with “popery” and tyranny in tracts that borrowed freely from
Areopagitica: Charles Blount’s A Just Vindication of Learning (1679) and Charles Denton’s
An Apology for Liberty of the Press (1681). This was not yet overtly in the tradition of Milton
– Blount mentioned him in passing – but the shared preoccupation was his genealogy of
censorship as “an old Relique of Popery” imposed on England by enemies within (Kemp,
2009: 206). To this were added other plagiarised or paraphrased passages from Areopagitica,
notably those relating to the pursuit of truth and learning, while Blount augmented Milton’s
classicism with a Tacitean echo in urging “the same freedom to write, as to speak” (211).
Blount went further by stating explicitly that a free press exposed to public judgement “who-
ever opposes the Publick Interest”, a key idea in the liberal tradition, although this is picking
out liberal plums: on the same page, he declared that a censorial Catholic ruler in Protestant
England would be as “disagreeable, as to behold a black Indian head, annex’d unto a white
Body” (Kemp, 2009: 204).
The free speech tradition is measured in practical milestones, not only principles. In
1695 statutory pre-publication censorship ended in England through principally practi-
cal objections, including that post-publication laws such as seditious libel would suffce. In
eighteenth-century memory-making the milestone was absorbed into England’s “Glorious
Revolution”, the 1689 replacement of Catholic James II with Protestant William and Mary,
as were the Toleration Act, commercial advance symbolised by the creation of the Bank of
England and regular elections and party government: it became a “Revolution Principle”. In
Jürgen Habermas’s infuential account, England at the turn of the eighteenth century was
the place and period that saw the emergence of the “liberal model” of the public sphere,
destined to spread to America and Europe over the next century and a half, crucially tied
to rising “bourgeois” interests, not least trading in political disputation (Habermas, 1989:
xviii, 57–9). Debate on politics and morals became routinised in an expanding periodical
press, even party writers claiming to be non-partisan in judgement and open to the better
argument, forging a notion of informed public opinion as an active presence in society, based
on approbation or acquiescence towards the practice and principle of liberty of the press,
construed frstly as the absence of prior restraint.
The “end of censorship” in 1695 was a practical and partly accidental milestone but a
tradition centred on evolving principle is drawn to fnding a spokesman for the liberalising
shift, a role tending to fall to John Locke as the foremost forerunner of liberalism, as well
as English (Kemp, 2012). Another major early Enlightenment thinker, Baruch Spinoza, had
been published in English translation in 1689 arguing, after Tacitus, for the freedom of a
man to “think what he will, and speak what he thinks”, but this Portuguese-Jewish denizen
of the Dutch Republic remained outside the Anglophone tradition, though neither does
he feature in Habermas’s wider European perspective (Spinoza, 1689: 435). Locke’s inclu-

27
 Geoff Kemp

sion has nonetheless been a questionable ft, and intermittent, because he did not address
freedom of expression at all directly in the major works published in 1689–90, requiring
interpretive extrapolation. Since the eighteenth century the Two Treatises of Government
has been claimed to imply the inclusion of freedom of expression among the natural rights
recoverable under government, and Locke’s case in Letter Concerning Toleration taken to
extend from belief to free expression. However, Locke’s published texts are elusive on the
subject and cautious about the scope of natural-law duties: Religious worship is a matter for
one’s maker not magistrate, but not so opinions tending to disturb government and society,
including calumny and hatred (Kemp, 2019: 174; Waldron, 2012: ch. 8). Argument from
natural right is prized in a libertarian liberal tradition but locating a suitably direct quotation
on free speech tends to involve treating a quotable work like Cato’s Letters as “Lockean”
(e.g., Kelley and Donway, 1990: 70).
The Locke text seldom quoted is the one he wrote directly against censorship, a manu-
script critique of press licensing directed to its abandonment by Parliament in 1695. This
opened with an echo of Blount’s Tacitean echo – “I know not why a man should not have
liberty to print whatever he would speake, and to be answerable for the one just as he is for
the other” – but mainly comprised detailed criticisms of the legislation and the book trade
monopolies it fostered at the expense of readers and writers. It did not invoke an earlier
tradition unless we count Tacitus and complaint at the price of “Clasick authors”, nor did it
“offer sonorous Miltonic appeals for liberty of expression”, as Goldie notes, though unlike
Areopagitica it might lay claim to having some immediate effect (Locke, 2019: 322; Kemp,
2019: 173). Locke’s major philosophical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) is also marginal in the liberal narrative, though along with Areopagitica’s genealogy
of licensing it was a source for Locke’s admirer Matthew Tindal, who in 1698 was among
Locke’s earliest reinterpreters and possibly the earliest writer to expressly place free expres-
sion among “the natural Rights of Mankind”, albeit mainly on the premise that words do
much good and no harm. From Locke’s Essay Tindal’s pamphlet took a reference to the “law
of reputation” in human motivation, which Locke also called a “law of opinion”, Tindal
envisaging it working through a free press to constrain behaviour by “the rich and power-
ful”, in effect the “watchdog” argument of later liberal tradition (Goldie and Kemp, 2009:
34, 46; cf. Habermas, 1989: 91). Not least, he saw this forestalling press restraint, which
history showed arose in “Protestant Countries too”, though contrary to “those noble and
generous Notions our Ancestors had of Liberty” (49–50). The religious ties of freedom of
expression were beginning to loosen, while the perceived bond to an English lineage tight-
ened after 1689 and 1695.

British tradition-building in the century of the Enlightenment

The famous declamation on free speech in Cato’s Letters, the “essays on liberty” penned
by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the early 1720s, illustrates what Locke did not
write: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such
Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech, which is the Right of every Man,
as far as by it, he does not hurt and control the Right of another”. What followed was as
much appeal to history as a rights argument. Gordon, who wrote the Cato essays defending
free expression, cleaved closer to Milton than to Locke in drawing on classical example, in
this case Rome under the Republic and wiser emperors, as the blessed times of free speech
attested by Tacitus, who was here quoted directly. Cato diverged from both Milton and

28
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Keveät kuulen askeleet. — Oi hiljaa —
En kuulo enää, kuulin, kerran vielä…
Mut nyt ne haihtui.
Tuleeko hän jällen?
Jos hän, kuin moni muukin outo ennen,
Tul' ainoan tän kerran vaan? Ah, ei!
Sanoipa hän, hän lupas', että tänään
Tuleepi hän. Mut kaste lankeaa,
Jo ilta joutuvi. Ei, eihän tänään,
Sit.' ei hän voi. Mut ehkä huomenna…
Kuink' on nyt yksinäistä tääll' — —
VIIDES KOHTAUS.

JOLANTHA. MARTHA. Sitte Kuningas RENÉ ja EBN

JAHIA. Viimeiseksi ALMERIK.

MARTHA (tulee huoneuksen takaa ja lähenee kiireesti

Jolanthan huomattuaan).

Laps' armas!
Mitäpä näen mä! Herällä… oot täällä!

JOLANTHA.

Oi Martha! vihdoinkin! Miss' oot sa ollut?

MARTHA.

Luon' niittulaisten. Mutta sanos, ken…

Ken on sun herättänyt?

JOLANTHA.

Omin päin mä heräsin.

MARTHA.

Kuink', omin päin?

JOLANTHA.

Niin, muust'
En tiedä. Mutta kuules, etpä tiedä
Sä mitään, tääll' on ollut vieraita —

MARTHA.

Kuin, vieraita? Nyt pilailet sa. Keitä?

JOLANTHA.

Kaks outoa, joit' en mä tuntenut,

Jotk' eivät ennen ole täällä olleet.
Ikävä oli, että olit poissa.

MARTHA.

Voi lapsi, puhu toki järjin! Vierait'?

Oi mistä… miten, tarkotan ma —

JOLANTHA.

Mistä
He olivat, sit' en mä kysynyt.
Sanonut oot, ett'ei saa kysymällä
Vieraita vaivata.
 MARTHA (toimentuen).

Mut, lapsi, keitä

No oli siis?

JOLANTHA.

Sit' en mä tiedä, mutta —

MARTHA.

Ja yksin olit sa?

JOLANTHA.

Ma sua huusin,
Mut et sä kuullut.

MARTHA (erikseen).

Jumalani, eihän
Lie kenkään vaan!..
(Ääneen.)
Mut kerroppas —

JOLANTHA.

Oi Martha,
Ei niiden vertaist' olo täällä yhtään
Viel' ollut, toisen niist' ei ainakaan.
Niin laita varmaan lie, ett' on hän jostain
Ihmeitten maasta, erilaisest' aivan,
Kuin meidän maamme. Sillä voimakas
Hän oli puheissaan, ja kuitenkin
Niin hellä, herttainen, kuin sinäkin.

(Kuningas René ja Ebn Jahia tulevat toisten huomaamatta sisään

sala-ovesta ja viipyvät kuuleskellen perällä.)

Mua tervehti hän runolla — oi Martha!

Juur' eriskummaisella runolla,
Mi kyyneleet toi silmihini, vaikka
Osaksi vaan ma tuota ymmärsin.

MARTHA.

Toimennu, armas!
(Erikseen:)
Mitä saan ma kuulla?
(Ääneen:)
Mut sano, mistä puhui hän sun kanssas.

JOLANTHA.

Monesta — monest' oudost' asiasta.

Hän monta tiesi seikkaa, joit' en kuullut
Ma ole milloinkaan. Hän sanoi — vaan
En tajunnut mä häntä — sanoi, että
Juur' monta kappaletta erottaapi
Etäältä silmän kautt'.

MARTHA (erikseen).

Oi Jumala!
JOLANTHA.

Tajuutko sinä hänen tarkotustaan?

MARTHA (huomaa äsken tulleet).

Kuningas tääll'! Oi taivas!

KUNINGAS (erikseen Ebn Jahialle).

Mitä kuulen!
Jo ilmotettu mulle on!
(Astuu esiin lääkärin kanssa.)
Mun lapsen'!

JOLANTHA (lankee hänen kaulaansa).

Isäni armas, joko oot sa tullut!

KUNINGAS

Opettajasi tuon ma, Ebn Jahian.

JOLANTHA.

Vai hänkin. Suo mun sua tervehtää!

(Ebn Jahia kurottaa hälle kättänsä.)

KUNINGAS (vie Marihan syrjäpuoleen, joll'aikaa Ebn Jahia

puhuttelee Jolanthaa ja tarkastaa salaa hänen silmiänsä).

Mi tapaus on tääll' —?
MARTHA.

Oi, sit' en tiedä.

Kun nukkui hän, me siihen luotimme,
Ett' ei hän ennen heräjä, kuin häntä
Herätetään, ja poijes lähdimme.
Sill'aikaa — sanoo hän, mut mahdollist'
Ei lie se — joku outo tääll' on käynyt.

KUNINGAS.

Varomatonta mua! Ebn Jahiaa

Kun seurasin, ov' auki unhottui.
— No, Martha, outo tuo?

MARTHA.

Sen verran kuin

Voin päättää, kun hän viel' on hämillään,
Se hänen sokeudestansa puhui.

KUNINGAS.

Vai siitä! Siis on Luojan tahto, kaikk'

Ett' eeltäpäin on hänen tietäminen.
No niin!
(Viittaa lääkäriä.)
Oi Ebn Jahia! kuulitko?

EBN JAHIA.
 Ma kuulin; sattumus on auttanut.
Ja eräs outo hänet herätti.
Ma tuolta pöydält' amuletin löysin.
— Tilansa himmeästi vaan hän tuntee.
Mun täytyy vaatia, ett' toki, niin
Kuin lupasitte, ilmotatte hälle —

KUNINGAS.

Niin oon jo aikonut.

(Lähestyy Jolanthaa, joka tällä aikaa on puhunut Marthan kanssa.)
Mun tyttären'!
Nyt huomaavasti korvas kallista!
Salata kauemmin en saa, ett' elos
Eräässä käännekohdass' on, mi vaatii
Levollisuutta. Voitko maltilla
Sa mua kuulla, voitko maltilla,
Jos huoli sua kohtais' äkkiä,
Sa tuota kestää?

JOLANTHA.

Isä, puhu vaan!

Mun huolen' huojentuu, sun suustas kun
Sen kuulen.

KUNINGAS.

Kuulo siis, Jolanthani.

— Mit' outo tuo on sullo sanonut,
En tiedä. Luulen tok', ett' ilmaissut
Hän on, mit' aivan tarkoin salanneet
Sinulta oomme tähän asti: että
Sun sielus puuttuu mahdikasta lahjaa
Käsittämään maailmaa ympärilläs.
Niin on. Sa puutut näön aistia.

JOLANTHA.

Hän sanoi niin, mut en tuot' ymmärtänyt.

KUNINGAS.

Siis tiedä, että löytyy valon voima.

Ylhäältä, tuulen, raju-ilman lailla
Se tulevi ja yhtä ripsahasti.
Kaikk' esineet, se joihin koskee, saavat
Silt' eri tunnusmerkin, uuden arvon.
Ja lämpymään se liittynyt on usein.
Tien meihin saavuttaa se kautta silmän.
Ja vasta silmän näkövoiman kautta
Maailman rakennuksest' oikean
Me saamme käsitteen, minlaisena
Se lähti Luojan kädestä, ja hänen
Hyvyydestään ja viisaudestansa.
Mit' oot sa vaivoin arvata nyt saanut,
Sit' ohjaa silmä meidät näkemään,
Lajilta, muodost' oitis tuntemaan.
(Mielenliikutuksella.)
Huolemme kaikki korvas' vähän vaan sen
Vahingon, jonka lapsena jo kärseit.
Kaikk', jonka voimme, oli: surun taakkaa
Nuorilla hartioiltas huojentaa,
Ja katkeraa sen juurta sulta peittää.

JOLANTHA.

Oi isä! sanat kummat, mulle oudot.

Maailman rakennus, minlaisena
Se lähti Luojan kädestä, vai tuot' en
Ois tuntenut? se mult' on suljettu?
Kuin niin sa sanot? Enkö siis ma tunne
Luojaani mailman rakennuksest'? Ei!
Siis tuulen väkevyys, sen vieno löyhkä
Ja lämpö, kautta maan kun leviää se,
Ja luonto maan, sen voima kukat, kasvit
Hedelminensä kasvatella, eikö
Metalli, kivi, eikö virran vyöry
Ja lintuin kuorilaulu tuonut ilmi
Luojaani mailman rakennuksessa?
Ja enkö ole sulta, kaikilta,
Jotk' ovat mulle kalliit, saanut tietää
Luojamme tarkotusta mailman suhteen?
Hänenpä tahtons' ilme itsekin
Ma oon. Jos minne käännyn: koko luonnoss',
Omassa itsessän' ja muiden lauseiss',
Äärettömissä jaksoiss' aatteiden,
Kaikissa kohtaa mua sama ääni.
Julistain Jumalaa ja maailmaa.

KUNINGAS (erikseen lääkärille).

 Ah, Ebn Jahia! sulo-uskon tuon
Me oomme häirinneet!

JOLANTHA.

Ja selko mulle
Nyt tehkää: silmän näkövoimall' oon
Mä ymmärtävä mailman. Äskeinen
Tuo outo, jonka puhe syvälle
Mun mieleheni painui, näöstä
Myös hänkin puhui. Mitä siis saan nähdä?
Oi, isä! voinko nähdä hänen äänens',
Mi riemuin, huolin sydämeeni koski?
Mä silmin näenkö satakielen laulun,
Jot' usein miettinyt ma oon ja turhaan
Koetellut aatteissani seurata?
Sen laulu onko kukka, jonka tuoksun
Ma tunnen vaan, mut en sen kasvua,
Ei lehdykkää, ei kantaa?

KUNINGAS.

Lapsi armas!
Mua surettaa jok'aino kysymykses.
Sa tietäös: mull' ompi toivo.
On toivo, joka, piti tähän asti
Isääsi voimass', että näkö voidaan
Sinulle antaa, että silmäs taas
Voi aukeentua valon sätehille.
Opettajas, sun ystäväsi Ebn
Jahia, lääkärinä kauan on
Jo valniistaunut siksi hetkeks', jonka
Hän myöteljääksi ennusti. Nyt on.
Laps' armaisin, se tullut. Hänen haltuun
Hä itses anna. Hänen kanssaan käyt
sä sisään. Marthan myötänne mä lasken.
Sä ensin menet tainnoksiin… ja sitte,
Jos taivas sallii, heräjät sä, lapsen' —

(Keskeytyy.)

JOLANTHA.

Mik' on sun? Miksi kätes vapisee?

Oi isä, etkö riemuitse, ett' on
nyt hetki tullut, jota kauan varroit?
Pelkäätkö, ett' ei tämä onnistu?
Mut enkö sentään jää mä ainiaaksi
Sun tyttärekses, jota rakastat,
Jok' iloitsee sun rakkaudestas,
Osaansa tyytyväisnä —? Laske siis
Nyt mua menemään.

KUNINGAS.

Jolanthani!

JOLANTHA.

Oi, älä pelkää! Minkä mietti viisas

opettajan', se onnistuupi; — niin,
Sen tiedän, mull' on tunne, moinen juur'.
Kuin nyt jo tuntisin tuon kumman voiman,
Valoksi jota sanot, juur' kuin tänään
Jo minuhun se entäis'. Ah, kun hän,
Tuo kumma outo oli täällä, tunteen
Havaitsin, jot' en onnen havainnut;
Ja joka sana, jon hän lausui, kaikuu
Mun sielussan', kuin kanteleessa, uusin,
Ei koskaan ajateltuni sävelein.
— Sanoitpa äsken, että valon voima
On ripsas, että kaikki, johonka
Se koskee, uuden arvon saa, ett' usein
Se liittyy lämpymään — niin, eikö totta,
Sydämen lämpymään? — oi, sen mä tiedän.
Jos tuo se on, jon sanot valoksi,
Niin aavistaapi mua, että tänään
Se mulle ilmestyy. Mut yhdessä
Sä petyt: silmällä ei suinkaan näe.
Vaan täällä, luona sydämen on näkö.
Sisässä tääll' on, sulo-muistelona,
Tuo valon kajastus, mi mua kohtas',
Tuo valo, jota kohden nyt mä lähden.

(Menee sisään Marthan kanssa, joka tällä välin oli lähestynyt.)

KUNINGAS (lääkärille, kun hän on sisään menemäisillänsä).

Oi, varro, Ebn Jahia! — Käsitätkö

Sa tuota? Kenpä lie tuo vieras, joka
Häiritsi hänen sydämensä rauhaa?
Mit' aatella mun tulee puheestaan
Noin innokkaasta? Mitä arvelet?

EBN JAHIA.
 Ei olo nuoren mielenkääntehistä
Juur helppo päättää. Tämän ehkäisee
Mun tuumani, sen myönnän.

KUNINGAS.

Selitäppäs —

EBN JAHIA.

Niin, levon jos hän saapi aatellessaan

Tuot' outoansa — tämä aatos näyttää
Hänessä vallitsevan — niin mä pelkään,
Ett onni taitoan' ei kaunista.
Se puuttuu siten alustaa. Mut ehkä
Tuleepi tässä kohden tarpeen vaihdos,
Jotk' yhdessä, ja yhtä halukkaasti
Kaipaavat tyydykettä. Ollen niin,
On mulla toivoa, mut — vähän vaan.

(Menee sisään.)

KUNINGAS.

Oi Jumala! Ken on tääll' ollut? Bertrand

Sit' eikö tienne —
(Almerik tulee sala-ovesta.)
Almerik! sä täällä?

ALMERIK.

Tuon teille kirjeen.

KUNINGAS.

Kirjeen? Tristanilta?
(Aukaisee kirjeen.)
Niin, hältä on se.
(Lukee.)
Mitä näen mä! — Kuule!
Hän rauhan rikkoo… tekemämme liiton
Hän purkaa tahtoo —

ALMERIK.

Tahtoo liiton purkaa?

KUNINGAS (lukien).

Mi kumma! Myöntää väärin tekevänsä.

Ja senvuoks' asian mun haltuun' jättää:
Mut — epää liiton tyttäreni kanssa!

ALMERIK.

Sit' ylpeää!

KUNINGAS.

Ah, Almerik! Mua noutaa

Mun vanha kova onneni. Mä pelkään,
Ett' enne tää on paha tämän hetken
Tapahtumalle. Tämän naimisen,
Jost' unelmat niin kauniit näin, mä liitin
Keveämielisesti tuohon toivoon,
Ett' taas Jolanthani sais näkönsä.
Mun toinen toivon' petti, toinen lie jo
Perästä tuokion — mut ei! en tahdo
Nureella itseäni halventaa.
Tapahtukoonpa, mitä Luoja sallii.
— Ken kirjoen toi?

ALMERIK.

Yks miesi Jauffredin.

Jauffredin luona Tristan on, hän sanoi.

KUNINGAS.

Jauffredin luon'? No siis on ehkä toivo —

Kenties voi hän — Mut hiljaa! kuulen häikkää
Ja miekkain kalskeen — tuolla käytävässä…

ALMERIK (joka lähenee salakäytävää).

Väkisten ryntävät ne —

KUNINGAS.

Väkisten?
Voi kelvotonta!

ALMERIK.

Väkeämme siell'
On joku vaan.
KUNINGAS.

Nyt miekkaan. Kostamatta

Ei herjaa kenkään kuningas René'tä.
KUUDES KOHTAUS.

Kuningas RENÉ. ALMERIK. TRISTAN välkkyvässä asepuvussa

seuroinensa.
Sitte JAUFFRED seuroinensa.

(Tässä kohtauksessa kajastaa iltarusko laaksossa, ja kaukaisilla

vuorilla, jota kestää näytelmän loppuun asti.)

TRISTAN.

Takaisin! Joukkionne vuoren juurell'

On voitettuna. Vangiks' antaukaatte!

KUNINGAS.

Ken oot sa, hurja, jonka julkeus

Aseilla riivoaapi paikan tään?
Nyt herkee! kostoan' jos tahdot välttää.

TRISTAN.

Sa sanojasi säästä. Min' en pelkää.

Mä kyllä luulen tätä paikkaa jonkun
Pahaisen vallan alaiseksi. Mut
Mua innostaapi valta moinen, jok'
Ei tuota pelkää. Vuoren peikot jos
Sua puoltavat; jos loitsia sa oot,
Mi luotat voimiin salaisiin, niin tiedä:
Mun miekkan' pyhä isä vihki. Vyöni
Marian luostarissa Avignoniss'
On hurskas priorinna ommellut.
Tää asu kätkee aikeen sua häätää,
Kuin pyhä Yrjö lohikäärmettä.

KUNINGAS.

Sä mieletön! Mi tänne sinut saattaa?

TRISTAN.

Sa vastaa! Laakson hallitsia ootko?

KUNINGAS.

Mä kyll' oon hallitsia laakson tään,

Ja enemmänkin; mut ken sinä oot?

(Jauffred tulee sisään seuroineen.)

JAUFFRED.

Mitäpä näen mä! Kuningas René!

(Lankea polvilleen.)
Oi kuninkaani!
 TRISTAN (erikseen).

Kuningas René!

KUNINGAS.

Sa, Jauffred, yksin vehkein kanssa moisen.

Mi rikkoo kuninkahan rauhaa?

JAUFFRED.

Anteeksi
Edellä riensi hän — mä myöhästyin.

KUNINGAS (Tristanille).
No, kenpä oot sa?

TRISTAN.

Vaudemont'in Tristan
Ma oon; sen nimen varmaan tunnetten.

KUNINGAS.

Kuin? Tristan?
(Jauffredille:)
Onko totta?

JAUFFRED.

Totta on se.

KUNINGAS (muistelIen).