Having run through one hundred and ninety-nine topics as diverse as Autism, Northern Ireland, and Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press produced their two hundredth ‘Very Short Introduction’ on ‘Free Speech’ in 2009. The series began in 1995 and it might say something about the cloistered world the publishers inhabit that probably the most important issue of the last twenty years took them so long to get round to.

I am not a fan of short introductions, which are part of a dumbed-down, quick fix, ‘knowledge transfer’ approach to important issues. How many people read the ones they buy, or get free with magazines, is hard to tell.  What they get out of them if they read them is also limited, as a focus group of post-graduate students made clear to me! Most of them hadn’t read the editions they had and if they had read them they thought the authors distorted their subject. A friend has a shelf full of these and other ‘introductions’ of the comic book variety but hasn’t read any of them.

I want to say if anyone wants to understand free speech, get stuck in, and speak up!  That is not to be philistine. On this topic more is needed than trying to ‘provide a critical overview of the main arguments about what free speech is and why we should care about it’ which is Nigel Warburton’s aim in this book. It would be an outstanding achievement if he could say why we should care about free speech, but instead he merely skirts around and distorts the main reasons.

There are two related reasons why freedom of speech is the thing we should care about more than anything else. First, freedom of speech is not about the right of bigots to speak, but about the listener, about ordinary people. If someone says that we can’t hear something and make up our own minds about what is said, they deny our full humanity; even worse they say we are less then human. This view of some people as less than human is often couched in the language of vulnerability: young people, ethnic minorities and women will be too fearful or upset so must not hear ‘offensive’ speech. Seeing certain people as ‘victims’ in this way is merely the contemporary form of a diminished view of humanity that has a long and reactionary history. How often have we heard in the past about certain groups not being as able to cope with something as well as adult middle class white males?   

Whether the argument against free speech has this diminished perspective or not there is a second and more general reason why we should care about free speech. Freedom of speech is the foundational freedom. Taking it away, even in one instance, threatens all other freedoms, which must be based on the speech act; the ability to hear, understand and respond to what someone else says about the world. Not because their view is important – which it may or may not be – but because it is impossible for the listener to know what he or she thinks without checking their understanding of the world against that of others.

JS Mill makes this point very forcefully:

‘the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clear perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with errors.’ [my italics]

Warburton puts an extended form of this quotation in a grey box in a short section entitled ‘the dead dogma argument’ and he comments that this process of uncensored debate is important for individuals and society, but then he adds two curious sentences that tone down Mill’s charge of ‘robbing humanity’:

‘Progress [in society] is achieved through a polite battle of ideas rather than through one side having exclusive access to the podium. What Mill desires is the cut and thrust of a good seminar rather than a monologue’ (p29).

Warburton misses Mill’s point, and the comparison with a polite academic discussion allows him to suggest that things have changed and we can no longer draw the line between speech and harm that Mill did. He goes in to suggest we should be more sensitive to ‘psychological harm’ (p31). Discussing the probability that Mill would have defended the performance of the play Behzti, which was disrupted by Sikh protesters in Birmingham in 2004, he says ‘Mill’s general stance on free speech is insensitive to the precise point at issue here, which is the alleged sanctity of certain symbols…’ (p37).

Warburton discusses ‘No Platform’ policies in the same way, focussing on the speaker and possible ‘sensitivities’ and concludes that ‘No Platform’ is only partial censorship, while conceding that if the result were to be a situation in which ‘people’s ideas don’t get expressed openly and are not subjected to critical scrutiny, then this would be an unfortunate result’ (p41).

‘Unfortunate’ is hardly the word to describe the consequences of a policy already adopted by the National Union of Students that says to millions of young people ‘there are some things that cannot be heard because they might hurt and offend vulnerable people’. Mill, of course, pointed out that it is people in power who are mostly sensitive to criticism and the policing of thought through ‘sensitivity’ always favours the status quo. Calls for the curtailment of free speech in the name of ‘sensitivity’ are just as deeply conservative as old-fashioned criticisms of rudeness and disrespect for your betters.

Free speech is all about the audience, the listeners, who are there to engage in open debate. Another way of putting this is to say that free speech is about the public and the democratic right of people to make up their own minds rather than have their betters, whether royalty – think of Prince Charles, the State, or the Church or the Mosque - decide what is too offensive for our sensitive ears.

Warburton touches on many debates and reminds us of the sheer volume of restrictions on free speech, but he concludes with the naïve hope that the power of the unregulated internet to protect free speech by giving billions a voice. Such technical and technological dreams avoid the real issue.

Free speech can only be protected by speaking up and saying what you think. If Warburton, as an academic, takes the issue he writes about seriously he should start where he works and defend academic freedom and with it free speech. If he did that the future of free speech would be more certain, because academics at the present time don’t defend their professional role, which is not technical research, but criticism. This affects everyone’s defence of free speech. The university should be a beacon for free speech through its defence of academic freedom.

Curiously, as there are many attacks on academic freedom today, Warburton does not mention any. Perhaps he does not see it as a problem. Perhaps it could not fit in ‘a very short introduction’. Perhaps it was seen as a separate topic. All three reasons might explain why this book does not do what it says on the tin and tell us why we should care about free speech. Let me be very short. We should care about free speech because it is the foundation of our humanity.

Dennis Hayes is the founder of Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF). AFAF recently launched the first ever International Academic Freedom Day on John Stuart Mill’s birth date, 20 May. AFAF has also launched a new web site: www.afaf.org.uk