My mentor, Erwin Knoll, who served as editor of The Progressive from 1973 until his death in 1994, was a First Amendment absolutist. He supported the right of people he disagreed with, even those whose perspectives he loathed, to speak freely, without interference from the state. A survivor of the Holocaust who fled his native Austria as a child, he zealously defended the right of Nazis to spew hate and sow division. The proper answer to bad speech, he often said, is good speech.
Not so fast, writes Fara Dabhoiwala in his new book, What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea. The Princeton historian, whose previous book bore the scintillating title The Origins of Sex, points out that Erwin’s adage is not always true. Sometimes, bad speech leads to bad things happening, and for that reason should be—and, to a large extent, generally is—subject to constraints. Dabhoiwala believes this is often appropriate, given the power that speech has to change how people view the world around them.
As his book’s subtitle conveys, Dabhoiwala sees free speech as inherently dangerous, for two opposing reasons. On one hand, free speech creates the “potential to unsettle orthodoxy, give voice to rebels and iconoclasts, and rouse people to action,” for which it is rightly celebrated. But, on the other hand, the ideal of free speech has been “perpetually manipulated by the powerful, the malicious, and the self-interested—for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension, or to subvert the truth.”
Indeed, Dabhoiwala darkly muses that, despite all the good that comes from a free press and a tradition of free expression, the “overwhelming currency of popular political discourse [is] not reasoned debate but hateful lies and conspiracy theories, inflammatory misinformation, crazy rumors, and outright fakery.”
There is no denying that speech has often been excessively policed and unduly punished. For instance, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, Dabhoiwala writes, “If you were unwise enough to speculate publicly about your king or queen’s person or policies, you were liable to be arrested, pilloried, flung into jail, fined ruinously large amounts of money, or worse.” Equally draconian consequences remain in place in authoritarian regimes.
What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea
By Fara Dabhoiwala
Harvard University Press, 480 pages
Publication date: August 5, 2025
Dabhoiwala says the concept of free speech grew out of global support for freedom of the press, which between 1750 and 1850 “became one of the most hotly debated legal and political questions in the world.” But in almost every instance, the resulting laws affirming the right to freedom of expression explicitly “did not extend to its abuse.” With the right came responsibility.
As Dabhoiwala sees it, the First Amendment’s absolutist wording (“Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”) was a “historical accident,” adopted in contradiction to more balanced positions embraced by other countries and in state constitutions. Indeed, he calls the First Amendment “the world’s only free-speech law framed in unconditional terms.” The others all contain references to limits and accountability.
Beginning in 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court came to adopt interpretations of the First Amendment that focused on the individual right to free expression. But even still, it was generally understood that the right to speech had limitations, and not only against crying “fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Dabhoiwala, in a footnote, mentions a 1942 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that still stands which declared that “libelous” and “insulting” words meant to inflict injury or “incite an immediate breach of the peace” are not protected under the First Amendment. Rather, the ruling holds, “such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
In a series of decisions during the 1960s and 1970s, Dabhoiwala says, the court “fundamentally changed its interpretation of the First Amendment.” Now, for the first time, “American free-speech ideals really became exceptional, compared with those of the rest of the world. One of its main results was to end any constraint on hateful or otherwise discriminatory speech. Nowadays American Nazis, antisemites, racists, and other spreaders of group hatred all shelter behind the First Amendment.”
In recent years, Dabhoiwala declares, expansive interpretations of the First Amendment have also led to the free-speech rights of corporations being granted equal footing with those of individuals, creating a system in which “political speech and the spending of money are now essentially the same thing: more money, more voice.”
Moreover, he says, things have gotten to where simply to cry “First Amendment” in a U.S. courtroom “is to invoke a card that trumps almost everything else, as long as you can define your actions (refusing business to gay customers, say, or circulating instructions for how to make untraceable ‘ghost’ guns, or practising polygamy, or attempting to undermine the results of an election) as a form of expression.”
Harvard University Press
The unqualified prohibition on government infringement of speech has grown so vast that a federal judge in 2023 concluded that it was illegal for the government “even to ask a private company to do something about the spread of egregious medical misinformation online.” It’s why, as Dabhiowala notes, “the problem of children’s exposure to porn is vastly greater than it was thirty years ago.”
Dabhoiwala is critical of the American Civil Liberties Union’s presumption that, as he puts, “even the most hateful, untrue, or otherwise toxic views are worthy of public dissemination.” He notes that among those who consider themselves to be a “free speech absolutist” is Elon Musk. It’s a stance perfectly congruent with his desire to maximize profits by minimizing the costs of content moderation.
In What Is Free Speech?, Dabhoiwala calls for striking a balance between freedom and responsibility that “presumes that the marketplace of ideas ought to serve the public good, and that the truth can sometimes need protection from deliberate falsehood.” One that “recognizes that speech is an action, and that it can sometimes cause harm, whether singly or cumulatively, to individuals, groups or the public more generally.”
I don’t know how Erwin Knoll would feel about that. My guess is that he would draw a hard line against anything that expanded the ability of the government, broadly defined, to rein in speech, no matter how obnoxious. And then he’d eviscerate people like Elon Musk who turn a blind eye to hate, as well as those who spew it. He would turn their own words against them. And, to the extent that this constituted an argument, he would win.