The most recommended books about freedom of speech

Unscrupulous leaders often stir up mob violence in service to their own ambitions, taking offense at slights that they could choose to shrug off. George charges such groups as the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the Front Pembela Islam in Indonesia, and ACT! for America in the United States with pursuing power, money, and attention by shrieking that a blasphemous cartoon, a multicultural textbook, or a new house of worship threatens the dominant religion. “Explosions of righteous indignation and incitement are more than the hysteria of mad mullahs and enraged mobs,” argues George. He reminds us to look past the young men throwing rocks and find the movement leaders who stand to gain.

I was asked to review this book and possibly provide an endorsement. After reading it, there was no way I couldn’t endorse it.

It is a bracing read with such difficult stories. But hearing these stories is necessary for any change to take place. For American Christians, especially American Evangelicals, the abuse of women has been hidden.

It is time for a reckoning, and Sarah’s book is a necessary start. Her empathetic writing helps bring readers along, and this book should be required of anyone entering into ministry.

This book is not actually about wokeness. Instead, it helps us see the dangers inherent in that ideology.

Perilous Times is a partial history of the American government’s censorship of speech and thought from the 1790s to the early 2000s. Stone is a fabulous storyteller. Even though I’ve studied – and taught – constitutional law and constitutional history for decades, some of what he recounts was new to me, and all of it was newly fascinating in its detail and its focus on people as well as events.

In a way, this is a “be careful what you wish for” warning to both the woke and the unwoke: once it becomes widely accepted that it’s OK to restrict harmful speech, anyone who disagrees with whatever the majority or the government happens to favor is at risk.

This is one of those books I thought about long after I’d finished reading. Through human greed and global warming, the resulting decimation of the planet means food and water are rationed for survival…but so are words. Noa, the leader of the community, believes that words and how they were used, led to the downfall of humanity so allows people to only use a list of specific words. Except for the wordsmiths, who are allowed to know them all. 

As an author whose life is all about words, this was a really interesting book to read – what does it do to a society when ideas, thoughts, creativity are stifled by lack of words? And when everything is rationed – water, food, words, enjoyment – what does that do to a community?

I have collaborated with Bettany over many years—in her scholarly documentary filmmaking, including programmes on Socrates of Athens (469-399). Socrates never wrote or published in written form a word of his philosophy, yet through his immediate and succeeding disciples (above all Plato and Aristotle) has been hugely influential. But was he a democrat, as his fellow Athenians understood that term? In 399 a jury of 501 of his peers, chosen randomly by lot, delivered their resounding—negative—verdict, and condemned him to death by hemlock poison for being undemocratically irreligious and for teaching his pupils undemocratic values. Plato violently disagreed, and the debate over Socrates has continued ever since. Since it can be made to appear that he was convicted by an illiberal jury on grounds of his use of (democratic) freedom of speech, his condemnation has often been used as a stick to beat the ‘tyranny of… show more.

This is the most obvious book on this list. If you do read one book about climate change, make it this one.

It’s mainly not about climate change at all, but about the difficult balance between protecting people and freedom of expression. If we want a society that makes life better for all, and I do want that, we need to get this balance right.

It’s hard, as Nelson shows, but also incredibly exciting to identify freedom, in art, in sex, in drugs and in climate. This list isn’t an accident. 

Jacob is the founder and executive director of Justitia, a Danish think-tank. He had the brilliant idea of organising and presenting a lengthy and probing podcast series, Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech, and that is the basis of this book—written by himself but adopting and adapting the originally oral contributions of his many online guests. Of whom I was one of the first, since he chose to begin at the beginning with ‘Ancient (that is, Greek) Beginnings’. Rather than free speech being a danger to democracy, it has unique, universal, and enduring importance, as a liberating and equalising principle and force throughout history and around the world. But it also has costs. Was Socrates justly condemned? Jacob thinks not, but I tend to take the side of the majority of his judges.

I have met Orlando only once, alas, at the university where he has taught for many years (Harvard), he is both a novelist and historical sociologist. For a Black scholar originating from Kingston, Jamaica, to write approvingly of forms of freedom that he believes ‘made’ Western culture, when that culture arguably in both its ancient Greek and its modern Euro-American modes was also based on slavery, is in itself very remarkable. This is the first of a two-volume study.

Ellis chronicles the history of how the university turned from an institution of open inquiry into a political monoculture that requires those in it to adhere to a particular ideology. Ellis is particularly good at showing how the strengths of the traditional university were turned into weaknesses and allowed it to be captured by the adherents of identity politics. Old-style independent scholars are hard to organize, Ellis points out, because they are just that—independent. But these truly independent scholars were no match for the politically organized groups that wanted to use the university to advance a political agenda.

Kurt, a Swiss-German scholar who spent much of his career in Germany and the United States (Brown University), is an old and beloved friend of mine but I would have chosen this book even if he had not been. Its origins go far back, to the author’s Habilitationsschrift (Free University, Berlin, 1979), but it was completely updated for its English reincarnation. Its seven chapters take the story of Greek freedom, both internal and external, both political and cultural, from its origins in the 8th century BCE down to the Roman conquest and occupation of Greece in the 2nd century.