Interview by Emmanuel Tellier
This Danish lawyer, based in the United States, hosts the think tank The Future of Free Speech. In his book “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” (2022), Jacob Mchangama, a strong supporter of the right to tell the truth, draws up a gallery of portraits of defenders of free speech, from Pericles to Spinoza via Václav Havel. Brilliant!
L’Audace! :The strength of your book is to mobilize a large number of historical episodes allowing you, example after example, to illuminate the notion of freedom of expression. But if I asked you, at first, to give a purely theoretical definition…
Jacob Mchangama: I think we could start from a principle that no government or political authority should ever punish an opinion or a position even if it, at the time it is stated, can be considered abominable by a part of the public. I will purposely take an extreme example: the denial of the Holocaust. That this one is shocking, it is obvious. But applying a legalistic reading to history is, for me, a sign of weakness, not the mark of a healthy democratic functioning. So I believe that if groups of neo-Nazis march through the streets of Paris with swastikas, the principle of freedom of expression must allow them to do so. On the other hand, if this same group stops in front of a synagogue and brandishes baseball bats by shouting slogans hostile to citizens of Jewish faith, it becomes threatening, it is an incitement to violence: the police and the justice must then intervene … And the same principle should apply, let’s be clear, when it comes to groups of extreme left, for example those who protest in France, in Britain.
The defence of total freedom of expression is the only guarantee of absolute equality. Otherwise, we practice a policy of indignation with variable geometry, and this is inevitably indexed to the ideological sensitivity of the personalities who govern. Imagine that Marine Le Pen becomes president of your country: do you think that she will demand the same bans on collectives or political groups as if it is Jean-Luc Mélenchon who governs? The only way to guard against these ideological biases at the top of the state is to apply the principle of absolute equality, which only freedom of expression can guarantee. This freedom cannot be selective.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).