Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media

by Jacob Mchangama

To impose silence and call it tolerance does not make it so. Real tolerance requires understanding. Understanding comes from listening. Listening presupposes speech.

George Orwell disagreed. Having fought communism with his pen and fascism with guns during the Spanish Civil War, he cautioned against the “widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods” in an unpublished preface to his famous novel Animal Farm from 1945. He also discussed the dangers of treating as enemies “those who… spread mistaken doctrines” and warned that “if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”