capitalism

Freedom of Speech 183
16th century, religious war, mutual fratricide, torture,
hatred, and repression had rent the fabric of European society,
which pointed to the increasing incompatibility of
coercing inward belief and outward expression with the
needs of civil and policy society. Further, the consciences
of a growing number of Europeans were moved by the
seeming contrast between the violence of such coercion and
repression, on the one hand, and the claims of religion to be
a source of peace and love, on the other hand. For reasons
of practice and conviction, then, the call for liberty of belief
and expression grew steadily more compelling for those
who saw such spectacle as inconsistent with religion, creating
a growing desire to find ways to live in societies of
more mutual forbearance. The arguments on behalf of that
mutual forbearance, however, led logically and in practice
to freedom of speech being recognized as both a necessity
of our living peacefully together and a moral end in itself.
Many of the calls for religious freedom initially were
meant to apply only within limited but increasingly variegated
communities of belief: to Protestants in general, for
example; or, an extreme latitude at the time, to those who
simply believed in God. As usually occurs with claims for
liberty, however, the spirit of the arguments overflowed the
initial boundaries envisaged. In societies that believed religion
to be mankind’s highest calling and whose members’
greatest pain was occasioned by what they saw as heretical
or impious expressions, winning the debate on behalf of
liberty in religion—the area where restrictions on speech
seemed the most reasonable—carried with it a victory on
behalf of freedom of speech in general.
In the midst of the English Civil War, the Parliamentary
party attempted to censor the book trade by means of the
Licensing Order of 1643. In his Areopagitica, published in
1644, John Milton, although an ardent supporter of the
Parliamentary cause, argued passionately on behalf of
allowing the full force of free debate to sustain both liberty
and truth. Although his opposition to censorship was
intended for good Protestants alone, Milton’s soaring
defense of freedom of expression established more universal
themes. One can choose truth and goodness, he wrote,
only where there is “knowledge of evil”: “I cannot praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary.” Confrontation
with error, he wrote, is essential “to the confirmation of
truth,” and that confrontation depends on “hearing all manner
of reason.” Further, what men possibly could be trusted
to regulate human discourse? When God gave man reason,
Milton urged, “He gave him freedom to choose,” which
made human beings morally responsible. To “know” truth
because of coercion was without merit, and Parliament
would err grievously if it sought, even on behalf of the good,
“to suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new
light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city ...to
bring a famine upon our minds again.” Any “free and
humane government” favored “free writing and free speaking.”
Liberty, he wrote, raises the human mind to rare
heights: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue
freely according to conscience; above all liberties.” We need
not worry about the strength of truth: “Let her and
Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse,
in a free and open encounter?” England, he urged, should be
“the mansion house of liberty.”
On the Continent, generations of religious warfare and
persecution led many thinkers to believe that coerced uniformity
and suppression of differences in belief were far more
threatening to both the individual human soul and the stability
and peace of society than diversity of opinion and freedom
of expression. In many of his writings, the great critic,
polemicist, and philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706),
a Huguenot living in exile in Holland after the revocation of
even limited toleration of Protestants in France, argued that
suppression of the outward expression of sincere belief, however
false, corrupted the human spirit, leading men to a
damnable cruelty and hypocrisy. Holland, finely balanced
between Catholics and Protestants, permitted the most freedom
of speech of any nation in Europe by the late 17th century,
out of a prudential concern for what would follow if
various claimants to truth had to fight for control of the state
in order to have liberty of expression. In his Tractatus-
Theologico Politicus (1670), Baruch Spinoza devoted his
final chapter to the proposition that, “in a free commonwealth,
every man may think as he pleases and say what he
thinks.” Because belief was a matter of “individual right . . .
no man may surrender it even if he wishes to do so,” and
governments that sought to compel belief were “tyrannical”
and therefore unstable and subject to violent overthrow. At
the heart of such compulsion was the effort to control expression,
and “the most tyrannical government will be that in
which the individual is denied the freedom to express and to
communicate to others what he thinks.” The function of the
state was not “to transform human beings from rational creatures
into beasts or automatons,” but, to the contrary, “to
enable them to develop their mental and physical faculties in
security” so long as they did not harm others in their liberty
and security. In short, “the purpose of the state is, in actuality,
freedom.”
Shortly after his return to England from exile in
Holland, the philosopher John Locke published A Letter
Concerning Toleration (1689), in which he argued that “It
is one thing to persuade, another to command” and “It is
only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s
opinions.” Locke did not intend that his arguments on
behalf of toleration should apply in particular to atheists or
Catholics, both of whom he believed represented a danger
to the state and society. Yet as with the Declaration of
Independence, whose “all men are created equal” and whose
“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were far from
inclusive claims in the author’s mind, Locke had articulated