Description: Fara Dabhoiwala argues that free speech, though a central democratic value, owes its origin and evolution less to high-minded ideals than to venal interests. Shaped by greed, technological change, and the insoluble challenges of slander and falsehood, free speech is inherently contradictory--both a basis of liberty and a weapon of the powerful.
Brief description: Fara Dabhoiwala is Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and the author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. Formerly on faculty at the University of Oxford, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, All Souls College, and Exeter College.
Review Quotes: What Is Free Speech? couldn't be a more timely question, and Fara Dabhoiwala provides exactly the capacious history we need to address it. Dabhoiwala shows how an emphasis on free speech as an individual right has crowded out tougher considerations about the purpose, context, and audience for free speech. At once wide-ranging and trenchant, erudite and engagingly written, What Is Free Speech? represents the history of ideas at its smart, topical best.--Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World