The 300-year battle over free speech

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From America's founding fathers via John Stuart Mill to today's social media giants, Humanity has long wrestled with the idea of free speech. What does it mean? Can it really apply to everyone?

And is too much of it dangerous? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizin, Farah de Boivilla discusses a concept that has divided the world's great thinkers for 300 years. So far, as anyone who's been paying sort any attention to the news recently would have noted, free speech is one of the hot topics of the 21st century and at the very center of uh the so-called culture wars. But you argue in your your book, don't you, that this hasn't always been the case that for millennia free speech, at least as we understand it today, was not an intelligible concept.

I wonder if you could start by elaborating on that point a bit, because I I guess that might surprise some of our listeners. Yeah, absolutely. Uh very happy to. And it's a really important point because one of the difficulties we have in the present, in thinking and arguing about free speech is We always approach it from first principles as, you know, a philosophical question or a matter of principle, but it's really also a historical question.

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